Hal

The Nordic Table, four of us, with Lorraine and Hal. · Ray's sixtieth birthday dinner

Left on porches, in packages of six: Marlene - Connie - Lorraine and Hal - Harlan and Betty Nygaard - Pastor Kristin - Dee - Ruth - Helen - Inez Rude - LaVonne Thorson - the Fosdals

…t. - Thursdays. I come at 2 and stay until Hal is home. - Books that are "not about anything." I have a stack: Barbara Pym, the Mapp and Lucia books, Wodehouse. - The book club is told only what Lorraine wants told.

…s, and she felt like a ship being launched. The scan is in three weeks. She came to lunch today in the green hat, ate everything, and took a loaf home. Hal ate too. He has driven her to every appointment since November. My new passport came, good until 2032. Judy and I go to Norway in September, the two of us. R. sa…

…ore the stent. R. cannot do the shore trail with his knee, so we drove to the places we used to walk to, and sat. The knee will be replaced on November 8, by Dr. Rasmusson. R. asked him what the part is made of and was given a brochure. Lorraine and Hal were with us at the cabin for the first week of the month. On…

…six days. June is seventeen months old and unwrapped everything addressed to anybody. R. carved standing up, and was applauded. I bought myself a new tablet for the recipes and the bird calls. Lorraine and Hal came for coffee on the 23rd. She is thin in the face again. I asked, and she said the number they watch is…

…of us, and she ordered the walleye in R.'s honor and ate a third of it. She said, over the coffee: "I'd like you to do the talking at the funeral. Hal can't, and Annette shouldn't have to. Keep it under ten minutes. I've heard you at retirement parties." I said I would. Then she asked what I was reading, and we tal…

…ck, and on Friday she told the oncologist that she would like to feel like herself for whatever there is. Hospice began yesterday. There is a bed in the front room, by the window, and a nurse who comes on Mondays and Thursdays and whenever Hal calls. I went this afternoon. She was sitting up in the bed in a cardigan…

…, expecting something improving, and she said "The Wind in the Willows," which she read aloud to the third grade at Stony Brook every spring for thirty years and has nearly by heart. I do a chapter a visit. She corrects my Toad. Today was the river and the picnic. She had her eyes shut, and I thought she was asleep…

…lmer for a voice. When she was awake today she had business. She has given me three things, and had Hal bring them in so that she could see me take them. Her own copy of the book I am reading her, with her pencil in the margins from thirty springs. One drawer of the old card catalog from Stony Brook, the oak one, S…

…n the sofa. The nurse was there when I arrived, and took me into the kitchen and said, kindly and without softening it, that it will be this week. I read the chapter anyway. It was the one where they go out on the river before dawn to look for the lost child, and find him. I had forgotten that it was in there. I got…

…g, in the front room, with Hal and Annette and Vivian there. She was sixty-nine. I had been awake since four. I do not attach anything to that; I am often awake at four. R. came down and found me at the kitchen table and did not say anything. He put his hand on the back of my neck and left it there. Then he fed the…

- Funeral: Saturday the 29th, 11:00, Bethany Methodist. Lunch after, in their hall. - I speak after the second hymn. Under ten minutes; at home it runs 8 minutes 50. A second copy in Ray's pocket. - No flowers. Memorials go to the library at Stony Brook Elementary, for picture books. Our cheque is written. - Lemon bar…

…reat many of the people in it were between twenty-five and fifty and had once been eight years old in her library. I spoke for nine minutes. I had timed it at home, with R. holding the stopwatch from his tackle box. She told me to keep it under ten. What I said, in outline, so that I have it. That she was a librari…

…last name I have never learned and now cannot ask. Lorraine bought two tickets every year, for the 12:30 seating, and gave her fish to Hal. I looked for her at half past twelve. R. riced ninety pounds of potatoes last night with Harlan Nygaard.

…four with a glass roof over us and are fed every two hours. R. has not looked at a mountain since we boarded. He has looked at the railway: the spiral tunnels, where the line doubles back on itself inside the rock to gain height. He had a man in the vestibule draw it for him. He has explained it twice to our table c…

164 Canadian dollars. With Corinne and Hal Jessup. · Dinner in Banff, the last night

June 9. Chicago to Vancouver. A hotel on the harbour. June 10-12, Vancouver, three nights. The big park with the totem poles and the sea wall; the market on the island under the bridge; on the 11th the ferry to Victoria and back, an hour and a half each way among islands. That ferry gave me five new birds from the ra…