Thursday, November 13, 2014

Evanston: skinned; Love's story revisited; GANNET's face; safe


        I am back from a routine visit to the dermatologist looking as though I am back from the wars.  She froze several suspect spots and took cells to biopsy from three others.  This is merely precautionary.  Skin indeed is the organ to suffer most sailing across oceans.
        This was the second successive morning I rode the train into downtown Chicago for this appointment.  I made it via a Skype call from GANNET in New Zealand and entered the correct time and date in the calendar on my MacBook Air.  When I flew to Evanston, crossing the International Dateline, the computer recognized my new location and helpfully changed the time.  I did not realize that it also unhelpfully changed the appointments in my calendar.  In this instance by nineteen hours.  A woman in the office said I am not the first to whom this has happened.  Beware.

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        I received an email from Raleigh Love whose great-grandparents were featured in Ken Burns’s THE WEST and about whom I wrote last year.  He corrected me in that it was his grandfather, John-David, not John-David’s older brother, Allen, who had influenza at the same time as their father.  I also mistakenly referred to Allen as Adam.  Sigh.
        The Love family is exceptional through the generations.  Coming from no family, I wonder what being part of that must be like.
        The great-grandparent’s love story is well worth reading or rereading, and remembering.

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        After viewing the photo of GANNET a few days ago, Larry on the West Coast wrote about her face on the transom.  Others noted that face when I ran a photo a couple of years ago of her on the trailer as she was leaving the Illinois boat yard on her way west.  Some think she is winking.  Some that in sympathy with her crew she has a blind eye.  If so together we have a complete set.  Her good one is right.  Mine left.
        That open eye is I conclude where a man overboard pole was stowed.  Never having figured out how to throw myself such a pole after I fall overboard, I don’t carry one.   There is nothing behind the round plate on the left and I don’t know why it is there.
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        I just read on the Internet of a study that concludes that men who have had sex with more than twenty women are less likely to get prostate cancer than those who have not.
        That’s a relief.