Feeeelinnnngs

I hope everyone felt that our Thanksgiving spent together was good. Jeanette told me she thought it was the best holiday she'd spent for some time, if not ever. I was glad to spend time with everyone, and only wish we could have seen Mike (and Audra), and Mike and Sue and Kim and Brian (we got a card from them yesterday, expressing the same regret), and that we could have had more time with Cathy and her family. Bert, I think your insistence on no TV for the one day, at least, was a great idea and paid off in conversation and "quality time" spent. Thank you, thank you, thank you for hosting us!!! I hope your time with Dad was good and not too frustrating. I know I have a hard time conversing with him, some days, just because I get impatient........

On the way home from Queensbury, Dad was telling Ian that when he was a boy he went with his mother and grandmother "back" to Rhode Island to visit his great-grandparents (this would be Edwin O. Kenyon and Cordelia, A.B.'s parents, who had a cottage and a farm) and that there was a hill (I think) near Hartford, Connecticut at which they had to back up the hill. This was because the Model T had a gravity-feeding gas tank in front of the windshield, so the tank had to stay above the engine or it wouldn't make it. I'm trying to record on tape or take notes or type up all such things that he shares, just so I can keep them. I hope to get them all into a file on the computer, at the very least, and maybe get it into a book, using all the old family letters and diaries and things. In my spare time.......

We had supper with Dad Monday, after he had told me he was having a lot of frustration about his not being able to keep things straight. He had evidently dreamt that Mom was back with him yesterday morning, which I told him I didn't think was at all strange, however unsettling. We hope that spending some time with him helps.

Tuesday evening, I went to a meeting of the Alfred Bicentennial Committee, attended by Becky Prophet, among others, and she told me that when Dad went to their house after Stan's memorial (Saturday), that Dad and Lydia talked for more than an hour and that she thought it was great. I agreed. I guess that friendship started when Mom and Lydia roomed together at Crandall Hall and Greene Hall, in college.