A morning view

 It was a dreary morning, a very dreary one but I found a certain bleak beauty in the  mist.    It reflected my mood that morning.  Other days are much brighter.

gracias a dios.

Options

 Lately my dreams have had a common theme, options, from the call from a dark place to last night, a 

choice between languages, one thinly disguised as 'rainy' words.   

It is always so nice to wake up and find that I do not really have to make a choice, not yet anyway,  

Nevertheless, it weighs on my mind.

Post from Aflastningscenter.

 It is a little late.  I am sitting at a formica table in what is called a 'aflastningscenter' , a place where one can spend a short amount of time after a hospital stay, getting the strength back.  I feel fine and in some ways it is great to be by myself, as much as one can be by one self in an institution with the major part being a care facility for the elderly.

I have been here for a week now trying to think of * what next ?*.    

My sister has about reached her limit with me in her house and I cannot blame her. It is a small place and we are still trying to get to know each other after so many, many years of being apart, me doing my stuff in the US and later very little in Mexico, she raising a family and becoming a grandmother which seems at times to have been her ultimate goal in life.

So she and I decided that I needed to find a place of my own, a mall a apartment not too far from her place.   Unfortunately my health has not fully cooperated so it is looking a bit bleak, aside from the fact that it is rather costly to rent a place, although here in Denmark you can apply for and get, in most cases, a lot of help to pay rent and such like, specielt if you are old and infirm ( sick ) like I am.

So now I wait for an interview with a person who will assess me and decide if I can be helped with an apartment and help to pay for it.  It is going to be interesting.  

Back ?

Today on my morning walk I saw a sweet thing concerning a postman and a dog, and I wanted to share this incident with my sister when I got home, so I started to compose the story in my mind and finally said
DANG IT.
Why the outburst you wonder.
WELL
I am here in Denmark, a place where I have not lived for fifty years, trying to speak Danish again.
I am here because I have stage four cancer and need chemo treatment that I could not afford since I have no insurance and as a citizen of denmark I am entitled to partake in the welfare state.
So I am here, as a stranger in a strange land where everybody is kind and where I have connected with a family I barely knew and in some cases did not know at all.
And I get a bit tired of not being able to say what I think so I said to myself:
Self, I said.   Time to start blogging again and get some of the stuff out of your system.
So here I am.   And hopefully I can write myself out of the occasional funk.   I sure aim to try.

to run or not to run

I was waiting for the bus this morning, standing where my street hits the main street.
The bus driver must have been pre-occupied ( they often have long and emotional calls on the phone ) so it didn't stop but a fair ways away when the driver realized that I was there waving my arms frantically.

I jogged as best a septuagenarian can to get to the bus not wishing to make the passengers suffer from a long wait, and got on the bus and all was well when I got a seat and finally caught my breath.

And then I noticed that at the stops where people were waiting for the bus, and mostly gringos and mostly in my age bracket, none of them were jogging to get on the bus,  quite the contrary. They all seemed to take their time getting on, counting pesos and slowly making it down the aisle to a a seat.
What, I wondered, what in my make-up makes me think that I have to be so concerned about others?

Nobody else is.

In the future, if the bus decides to stop a distance away from me, I shall walk, composedly and with dignity, to the bus and get on without risking a heart attack from unseemly jogging.

After all, the bus is here to serve me, not the other way around, or is that too Gringo-ish for Mexico?

brotherly love

On  a lighter note there is a series of photos making the rounds on the webs; charming idea of a couple of brothers reenacting pictures from their childhood and youth. Both are now adults.

A lovely idea as it goes but if you scrutinize it a little closer there are flaws.  As I said these guys are now mature young men portraying their much younger and much less inhibited selves.  

I cannot but note that they, the guys of today, have felt that they must sport big and macho beards for no reason that I can see other than that many of the poses of the much younger guys of yesteryear were loving and cuddly and very intimate.

What better way to shush any nasty thoughts about the masculinity of these guys but for them to sport big and wild beards when taking the poses of the loving children they once were.

Cynical ?   You bet.

prices

And so I made it to my supermarket today, armed with a long list of things to buy.
One of the items was chicken and I saw that there was a sale of this critter, or rather a sale of the breast of this critter. Breast and part of the back. All this could be had for 59 pesos a kilo.
A bargain, they claimed.

?

I checked the price of a whole chicken and that you could have for 36 pesos a kilo and this would include the breast, the back, two wings and two legs plus whatever they had stuffed inside the critter ( feet and liver and that kind of stuff )  and I got to wondering

why would it be a bargain paying more for just the breast than you would buying the whole thing ?

What am I missing here ?