I'll See You Around

I'm ready to go. I've seen the surgeon and the anaesthetist. I've had my drink of fleet (DON"T ask. But let me assure you it works very well indeed). I've packed my bag - all the important things:

* Bible
* Cellphone charger
* Ipod charger
* PDA charger
* Bits of gear to attach to the above
* Pajamas, Dressing gown and slippers
* Toothbrush and shaver and all that stuff

Now the tricky part. What books to take? It's only 4 days or so and I'm going to be unconscious for one of them and queasy for the rest, so let's not go overboard.
* A couple of New Scientists (thanks Alan)
* Playing God (a book of poems by Kapiti Coast doctor and poet Glenn Colquhoun.)
* Love Poems From God. Twelve Sacred Voices From East and West (Spiritual poems from a variety of religious traditions)
* All Shall Be Well... (a novel by Tod Wodicka)

Poems you can give as much time to or not as you please. Let them make you think or just appreciate them for the beauty of the words. Read one or a dozen. It doesn't matter. Magazines: great, just so long as there aren't any pictures of Britney Spears or the Duchess of Cornwall, so New Scientist is usually OK. The novel looks good, but I'll see how I feel.

So tomorrow I report for duty at 9:00 am. I will be operated on at 11:00 or 12:00 (depending on how long the guy before me in the queue takes) and the operation will last about 4 hours. I'll be awake in time to watch England get resoundingly thumped, yet again, by the All Blacks but I'm not counting on staying awake for the whole game. In a few days I will bang my ruby slippers together and say "there's no place like home." Until then, I doubt I'll be adding much on here. I am deeply grateful for your friendship, your interest, and particularly, your prayers.

I'll see you around.

Comments

Anonymous said…

Best wishes, may it go well.

Daniel.

20 June 2008 at 22:50

Anonymous said…

With Love and Best Wishes for a Speedy Recovery, Kelvin,

Jane (UK)

22 June 2008 at 11:14

Alden Smith said…

Welcome back to your Blogspot :)

22 June 2008 at 20:56

Ko Tangata Tiriti Ahau

The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire. Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon...

Kindle

Living as I do in a place where most books have to come a long way in an aeroplane, reading is an expensive addiction, and of course there is always the problem of shelf space. I have about 50 metres of shelving in my new study, but it is already full and there is not a lot of wall space left; and although it is great insulation, what is eventually going to happen to all that paper? I doubt my kids will want to fill their homes with old theological works, so most of my library is eventually going to end up as egg cartons. Ebooks are one solution to book cost and storage issues so I have been using them for a while now, but their big problem has been finding suitable hardware to read them on. I first read them on the tiny screens of Ipaqs and they were quite satisfactory but the wretchedness of Microsoft Reader and its somewhat arbitrary copyright protection system killed the experience entirely. On Palm devices they were OK except the plethora of competing and incomp...

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and...

The Traitor

A couple of people have questioned me privately about the Leonard Cohen song The Traitor , and about Cohen's comments on the song, "[The Traitor is about] the feeling we have of betraying some mission we were mandated to fulfill and being unable to fulfill it; then coming to understand that the real mandate was not to fulfill it; and the real courage is to stand guiltless in the predicament in which you find yourself". What on earth does he mean, and why am I so excited about it? For the latter, check with my psychiatrist. For the former, my take on the song is this: The Traitor is another of those instances, as in The Partisan , where Leonard Cohen uses a military metaphor to speak of life in general and human love in particular. Many of us hold high ideals: some great quest or other that we pursue. These are often laudable things: finding true love, finding the absolute love of God, becoming enlightened, spreading the Gospel, writing the great novel or some such ...

Camino, by David Whyte

This poem captures it perfectly Camino. The way forward, the way between things, the way already walked before you, the path disappearing and re-appearing even as the ground gave way beneath you, the grief apparent only in the moment of forgetting, then the river, the mountain, the lifting song of the Sky Lark inviting you over the rain filled pass when your legs had given up, and after, it would be dusk and the half-lit villages in evening light; other people's homes glimpsed through lighted windows and inside, other people's lives; your own home you had left crowding your memory as you looked to see a child playing or a mother moving from one side of a room to another, your eyes wet with the keen cold wind of Navarre. But your loss brought you here to walk under one name and one name only, and to find the guise under which all loss can live; remember you were given that name every day along the way, remember you were greeted as such, and you neede...

Available Light

Search This Blog