Hand-me-down Gadgetry

So many thoughts have gone through my head in the days since I last wrote on Leif's blog. Memories of the day of his Memorial Service in inurnment on April 29th six years ago, thoughts of another Mother's Day coming without him in my life, thoughts of him riding his motorcycle when I see some other young man riding his, thoughts of all my inherited technology over the years.

I was the benefactor of many a piece of Leif's cast off technology when he moved on to something better, newer, "cooler," like his Treo, like this MDA phone. It was pretty sophisticated in its day, with it's slide-out keypad and many Windows functions. He gave it to me when he got a new phone (of course), but I was never able to use it because it didn't get a signal in our dense concrete house. I should have sold it long ago. It still works, but who would want it a 2005 or 2006 phone now?

I think about all of the things I learned from him about technical gadgetry, and how many I learned to use when he bestowed his castoffs on me. He could have probably sold them on ebay, but though he was perpetually in need of money, he was never ambitious enough to learn to sell his no-longer-need-goodies, and so those he didn't give to me ended up stuffed in a box or drawer. This isn't the only cast off phone of his I still have. And who am I to talk, now that I've had them sitting around my house for six years I never sold them (or used them), either?

Some of his replaced-by-newer gadgets he sold to us or other family members, but not others as far as I know. He sold his dad a Mac Mini years ago, and his grandmother a Gateway computer (which has since bit the dust).

I wonder what he'd be using now, if he were still here to spend his time checking out the latest electronic gadgets. He was an early adopter of the iPhone, so I'm sure he'd be either finding some way to get his hands on an iPhone 5 or a Samsung Galaxy 5, and no doubt he'd either have or covet and iPad Air.

What I miss is talking with him about all that stuff, learning something new, finding out his opinions. I can read about it online. I can see it in the stores, but it's nothing like listening to him hold forth with enthusiasm.

Hand-me-down phones and computers; I was lucky to have them. They may have been secondhand, but they were better than I would have paid for myself.

Ah, Leif, thanks for all the fun.

The Emotional Importance of Objects

I've written before about the emotional significance of things that once belonged to our deceased loved ones. I was reflecting on why certain ones are more important that others and I think symbolically, the ones that we associate with them due to our memories are the hardest ones to part with...if we ever do.

There are some of Leif's things that I don't use or see every day that I can't bring myself to part with; his photo albums, his wallet, his army uniforms and dog tags, for instance. There are also things I use every day that I don't want to lose.

A couple of times in the past few months I've been saddened to think I'd have to get a new cell phone. The one I have is almost five years old and it needed a new battery and had some sound problems. I didn't want to let it go because Leif chose it for me and brought it to me in July 2007 in a cute gift bag from t-Mobile. Although I paid for it, it was yet another example of Leif's importance in helping us with the technology of our lives. The phone I had before that had poor reception at our house, and he knew this one would be better.

I didn't want a new phone because this one I associated with Leif, but not just because he brought it to me. It was the phone on which we had so many text exchanges, sometimes whole conversations. Every day after I went swimming, I would check this phone for messages from him, and most days, it seemed, there was one. Often in the evenings he would send me messages and we'd talk about anything from politics to what was going on in our lives. I still have the last messages from him on the phone. I don't ever want to take them off. He's not there, but his last text messages are.

Leif had one of the first generation iPhones, always the one to adopt new technology. He loved it, and when he died, it was valuable for me to use the contacts he had on it for notifications to friends, his employer, and others I would otherwise not have known how to contact. I didn't want to switch carriers and pay the monthly data fees to use it as a phone, so I terminated his account and continued to use it as an iPod Touch for over three years. It was somehow a comfort to me to have it, hold it, use it.

Then one day not long ago, it froze. I couldn't get it to work no matter what I did. So I "restored" it to factory settings, thinking I could then restore the contents from a backup, but it didn't work. Then Peter dropped it on the metal rail of our bed and cracked the screen. I took it to the "Genius Bar" at the Apple Store to ask how I could get it working again. They said it was useless, in common parlance, "bricked."

I know it won't work forever, but it made me really sad to lose the use of it. I was determined to make it function again. My nephew, Rick, encouraged me to try jailbreaking it to see if that would help. Since it was long past warranty, I decided to try it. The results were frustrating. It would now at least get to the opening screen, but I couldn't get it to do anything further. My niece, Brenda, figured out that if you made screen input fast enough, you could get it to do one thing more . . . and if you were really fast, maybe a few more steps. We tried a lot of things and finally it worked for a few fast steps before freezing. Then the only way to make it work was to turn it off and back on again. Not satisfactory.

I couldn't help but wonder what Leif would have thought of to try, whether he would have had it working again in a couple of hours. I spent many hours over many days, determined but losing hope. I still don't really know what made the difference, but it's working quite well now, although it's anyone's guess how long. I'm glad. It makes me feel better, somehow, that it's working and that I can use it. It seems a little silly how something this small can make me feel a connection that really isn't there.

At his last birthday celebration on January 27, 2008, I took a couple of photos of him talking on his iPhone. I think he was taking to Justin about how to install a newer version of the Mac OS on the laptop he'd bought used from Justin. I was wishing he was paying more attention to us than his techie toys, but he was engrossed, so I took pictures. Today I decided to make the opening screen on his iPhone be one of those photos. The first photo is the unlock screen, which shows the photo in an app that gives a contact phone number in case I lose the phone and someone responsible and kind wants to return it (I removed the number for posting on this blog) and the second is just the photo alone.

There's something good about having this photo on his phone. Something that brings back memories of a good birthday evening spent together. Something that shows him using the phone I now hold in my hand, even with it's screen cracked in a spider web pattern in the upper right.

Tomorrow it will be four years since we last saw Leif alive. On April 10 it will be four years since we found him dead. It still seems as though I should expect him to come riding up to our door and take this phone out of his pocket to check his messages. I want him to.

He Lives in Dreams

A few days ago, I awoke remembering a dream about Leif. It's rare that I remember my dreams, and rarer still that I dream about Leif. In fact, I can't remember dreaming about him since early 2008, when I was so worried about him but dreamed that he was about seven feet tall and immensely strong, and that something wonderful was going to happen for him. It must have been wishful thinking, hope. I remember telling him about that dream and him laughing because I said he was built like "The Rock."

The dream I had a few days ago was quite different, though equally positive. I'm glad that if I was going to remember a dream about him that it was a happy one, with him looking young, healthy, slim and strong. He was dressed in some snappy suit, more stylish than traditional. It was a charcoal gray silk suit. Unlike some men, Leif liked to dress up, enjoyed wearing a tie.

The dream was so like him because he was happy and eager to show me this fantastic new "cell phone" he had. It wasn't like any I've ever actually seen. I wish I could have taken a photo in my mind so I could show it to you. There's something about it that makes me think of the realtime email discussion that he was having with his brother, Peter Anthony, me, and some others, on the evening before he died, about what would make the ideal watch. This gadget combined many of the attributes that Peter A. had suggested, plus more. It didn't look remotely like a phone, but actually more like a very stylish, very smooth calculator, with a sort of brushed metal case, glass screen similar to an iPhone, and some kind of trigger mechanism that reminded me of a pistol, but it wasn't a gun . . . though Leif certainly could have been the one to figure out how to combine that, too.

He was eager, happy, energetic.

It was only a dream, but he lived in it, and I will treasure that time to "see" him once again.
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This photo of Leif in his "famous" purple suit was taken in our back yard in Fort Buchanan, Puerto Rico around February 1991 when he was 16 years old. Of course he is also wearing his signature Oakley sunglasses.

Finding Photos

There are still surprises, still people from Leif's past who look for him online and find the blog or his Facebook page, memories others have I've never known, photos of him someone took I've never seen.

Last week I got out a couple of cell phones that Leif had in his apartment to see whether they worked and whether there were any photos or videos on them. When we found them, all I did at the time was put whatever accessories and manuals I found together in the appropriate box and put them in a bigger box to deal with later. I knew that a couple of them were phones we could use if we wanted to and just sort of kept them as backups. Then I thought i'd offer one to my granddaughter, who was going to get her own phone line, and figured I'd better put them back into the out-of-the-box settings. So, I took a look, not just at the memory in the phones but at some mini and micro SD cards that were used with them. And found photos of Leif I'd never seen before.

Some were painful to see, photos that Donna took of him in the ER after his motorcycle accident. Others made me wonder where they were taken, though I could see when by the filename the cell phone had given them. Long ago on this blog I wrote about wondering how many photos of Leif are "out there" somewhere, photos I'll never know exist and will never see, so it seems a bit ironic that i'd find some of them on two phones in my own closet.

This one is of Leif in his cycle jacket and cap, taken March 5, 2006, just a couple of weeks after he moved out of our house and into an apartment in Tampa. I remember that at that time, he had hope, was looking forward to being in the city, glad to have found a companion. In this photo he still has that speculative, sardonic little smile, that piercing gaze. I'd expect him to come out with some witty remark about now. I wish he were here and he could.

Dismantling a Life

We were sitting in O'Hare Airport waiting a connection on our way home from India and Peter W. wanted to call Peter A. to let him know we were safely that far and discovered that he didn't have Peter's Vonage phone number programmed into his cell phone. He hardly ever uses his cell phone or keeps the phone book on it up to date. I offered to enter the number for him and decided to look over what needed updating. I found several out of date numbers I needed to change, but then I found Leif's cell phone numbers, still there after Leif's death over 19 months ago. I could have just deleted them without comment but I asked Peter if he wanted them. He didn't, and they are now gone, but the fact that I had to ask, and that it brought the sting of tears to my eyes, made me realize yet again how hard it is, emotionally and otherwise, to delete or dismantle the things left behind after a loved one's death. Each time it feels like I am deleting a part of his life, of my contact with him, of the life he built. I remembered how hard it was to turn in Leif's military ID card to the office at MacDill Air Force Base. I remembered how hard it was to sell his motorcycle and have his car repossessed, to terminate memberships and so many other details.

I remembered again how it seemed like an invasion of his privacy to "snoop" through his papers and computer files for the information I needed to handle his affairs, how it felt wrong to dispose of his belongings, as though he would be coming back for them and be upset that they were gone. Of course I knew that wasn't going to happen, but taking someone's personal property and selling it, giving it away or throwing it away seemed so wrong, like taking apart the life he had built for himself and destroying its identity, removing it from the earth.

I think how little is left of his life, the photos, the memories, a few belongings, and yet how large the memories and the emotions are in my life.

I still have boxes of papers and possessions, like his army uniforms and boots, and wonder what will become of them, whether I will part with them or they will still be here when I die, with no one to pass them on to. It doesn't seem right.

I met a woman today who told me about a friend whose son died in a car accident over twenty years ago and they still have all of his clothes and belongings in his room, still as he left them. They even buy him birthday and Christmas presents. I cannot imagine that level of denial, but I understand their emotional need to pretend that he is in some sense still with them. I don't think it's a healthy response, but maybe it's what it takes to get them through the days. I wouldn't want that, but there are some things I want to keep, and others I don't want to see.

Leif's name is still in my phone book, on my computer and in my cell phone, not because I have an emotional need to see them there, though I confess it is hard for me to delete them, but because I still occasionally have a need to enter his address or phone number on some document and it's easy to find and access them where they are, but it still shocks me sometimes when I'm looking through the listings to see him there, as though somehow I could still magically give him a call.

How I wish I could!

I talked with a man in my neighborhood recently who grew emotional and had tears in his eyes when he said that when our parents die we realize our own mortality, that "we are up next" and that he would give anything for just one more hour with his father. I understand his feelings. I also know the feeling of losing my son, and how I'd give anything for one more hour with Leif.

Love does not go away. Sadness and grief grow softer, less acute, but they do not end. They do not go away, either. Deleting a phone number or selling a car doesn't make it any easier; it just reminds us of the loss.
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This photo of Leif was taken on June 13, 1990 in Greenbelt, Maryland where we were visiting my sister, Leif's Aunt Lannay, on our way from Chicago to Puerto Rico for Peter W's new military assignment there. Leif was 15 years old.

The Day Leif Died - April 9, 2008

The day Leif died, April 9, 2008, we had no idea anything was wrong until just after 1:00 p.m. I got call from Rodney, his supervisor at Humana where Leif worked. He said Leif hadn't showed up for work that morning and he was unable to reach him by phone or text message. He was worried, he said, because Leif was always reliable and always called in if he was sick. He knew Leif rode a motorcycle and knew of his accident the previous July. He wondered if something had happened to him.

I was concerned, but not scared at that point. I told Rodney I would try to find Leif and would ask Leif to call him, or I would. I was startled to get his call, though, because never in all the years Leif worked had I ever had a call from a supervisor of his, or anyone at the places he worked, saying he hadn't shown up. I was the emergency contact in Leif's record and that's why Rodney called me, a good supervisor trying to find out if his team member was safe, not just be mad at him for not showing up.

I then started calling Leif, over and over, on all three of his phones and sending text messages to the cell phones as well. He preferred text messaging and we did a lot of that. Here are the messages I sent to his iPhone:

"Are you ok? Your supervisor just called. Said you are several hours late for work and has heard nothing from you. Rodney XXXXXX. XXX-XXX-XXX. Call me. I am worried!" (Xed out phone number and last name for this blog.)
1:01:27 PM

"Where are you?"
1:07:17 PM

"Called Rodney back and said i couldn't get in touch with you. He said he was worried because you ride the bike on days like this. Hope you are ok and aren't jeopardizing your job. Worried!"
1:14:52 PM

"More and more worried! Where are you? Asleep? Wrecked? Hurt? Drunk? Run away?"
1:36:55 PM

"Hard to believe you would still be asleep on a workday even if you missed your alarm. My anxiety level is rising rapidly. Call. Text. Something!"
2:20:47 PM

"Wilson said he would let me know if he heard from you and he hasn't called so I guess you still haven't made it to work or called him. It's almost 3 pm."
2:56:07 PM

"Wondering if I should call your apt manager to check on you or drive there. But don't know how I could get in."
2:56:10 PM

"Please, son, let me know you are ok."
3:34:20 PM

"You in a coma? Know what day it is? Time?"
3:51:30 PM

"My imagination isn't doing me any favors. Please let me know what's up!"
4:24:41 PM

"Going to work out and swim. Taking this phone. Wonder if i should be driving there instead. I hope there is some good explanation for this that doesn't involve injury or worse."
4:28:43 PM

"In my overwrought imagination, I can only think of 4 reasons you can't reply with a txt msg. Lost both phones. Badly injured. In jail. Dead. Unless of course you are so pissed off at me you want me to worry like this, but I can't figure out any reason for that to be so. Gad, it's been over 4 hours since your boss called. Nothing. I'm scared."
5:07:22 PM

"Do I need to start calling hospitals? Would they even tell me if you were there with our privacy laws?"
5:44:28 PM

"Hell, I don't know where you are, can't even get into your apt to check on you. I'm going to start calling hospitals and the police if I don't hear from you by 9 pm."
8:20:53 PM

"If you are there and able to respond, please do. Talked to Michael. He said he was with you drinking til 3 am but left you ok. He hasn't gotten an answer from you, either. He is going to send someone from Tally Ho over to see if your car and bike are there. If they are and you don't answer the door, Michael wants them to call 911 and break in."
11:46:59 PM

I stayed in contact with Michael until after 1:00 a.m. He tried calling Leif numerous times. He was in Atlanta for a trade show, had gone there that day. He was frantic, too. We both were waiting for someone from Tally Ho, the pub across the street, to go check, and someone there said they would, but they never did. At that point I went to bed, resolved that if I hadn't heard from Leif or found out what was happening, I would drive to his apartment and figure out some way to get in if both vehicles were there. I don't know what I would have done if only one were there. That would have meant he had gone somewhere with the other one.

I've asked myself a thousand times why I didn't go to his apartment that afternoon and the answer is always the same. I thought that either he was not there, or if he was, he was deliberately not communicating (which had happened before), in which case he would not like or welcome the melodrama of his mother driving 30 miles to check up on him, or if he couldn't communicate, it was likely too late. Neither Peter W. nor I wanted to really contemplate whether Leif could be dead at home. It made no sense. After 5 p.m. no one was in the apartment management offices. I tried to call that evening and couldn't reach anyone.

I did call hospitals that night. None of them had him listed as a patient. I called the sheriff's office thinking there might have been an accident report, or that he might have been arrested for something. I even called the sheriff's offices in the counties between here and where D., the one he had just fallen in love with, lived, in case something had happened to him on the way there or back.

I had thought he might go to visit her on his day off and even stay overnight. I know he had wanted to do that. Maybe he had been too tired to drive back, was asleep with his phones turned off. Maybe he thought he had gotten Wednesday off, too, and had his schedule mixed up and was spending time with her.

I was hoping that one of these things was true, but my mind was telling me that something was terribly wrong. I envisioned him off the road somewhere after a cycle accident, not found yet. I envisioned him very ill with some awful asthma attack. I even envisioned him in a drunken stupor, but I never imagined that he had shot himself in his apartment, not during that day. I began to fear his death by the time I went to bed but I tried to keep hoping I would hear from him and he was all right.

As it turns out, it wouldn't have made any difference if I had gone to Tampa and gotten into his apartment somehow, because he was already dead long before Rodney tried to contact him about missing his shift.

Sometime between 3 a.m. when Michael and Jaime left and 8 a.m. when he was due at work, he loaded the new Springfield XD pistol and shot himself in the head in the kitchen of his apartment. We were told he died instantly. I hope that is true.
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The eerie photo above was one or a series Leif made of himself with a gun using the PhotoBooth program on his iMac. He experimented with the sepia and negative effects. This one is just how he made it except that I deleted the apartment background. Somehow it seems appropriate, ghostly, for remembering the day of his death. He actually made the photo on 11-22-07 at a time when he was depressed and felt his life had no purpose.

Leif & His Mom & Dad - Miami, Florida - March 20, 2002 - Age 27

Today we went to the spring FunFest in our community. It was a gloriously beautiful day with things to see and performances to enjoy (including me performing as part of the German American Chorus). It should have been fun, and sometimes it was, but sometimes I was sad. I couldn't help remembering that last year when we were at FunFest, Leif was alive, and he and I were sending each other text messages. I sent him cell phone photos of silly vehicles. It was hard to go through the day remembering that he is no longer there.

And last year at this time, he was newly in love, seemed so happy. I was happy for him. I created that "Find Joy" t-shirt because I was really happy. And then, less than three weeks later, he was dead. How could that be? How could he go from being so lonely and depressed the previous November (2007) to happy and in love March 15, 2008 to suicide on April 9th? My mind still can't really make sense of it, even though I can go through and list all the factors.

The next few weeks will be hard, are hard, coming up on the anniversary of Leif's death. I have to come to grips with the realization that he has really been gone a whole year. It seems impossible. He smiles out at me from my computer screen, those deep brown eyes so full of intelligence, mischief, fun . . . or melancholy.

This photo was taken in March 2002, almost exactly seven years ago, during one of our first trips to Florida to look for a place to settle. We were having dinner at a Thai restaurant in Miami. Leif loved South Beach, and he happened upon a group of RX8 owners who invited him to come to a club with them. He was taken with the Miami Beach nightlife and I think he would gladly have moved to Miami, though we were less enamored of it. He was so alive, wanted so much to move to Florida, yet in six years he would be dead.

I wish I could send him silly photos. I wish we could share a dinner out again. I wish I could give back his possessions and see him using them. I wish I could take time back a year and find a way to help him live.

Dimensions of Sadness - Missing Leif

It's been a hard week and I've been posting simple posts of happier times, reflecting the way I wish life still were, not the way it is right now.

My sisters were coming to visit and I got the bright idea to take each of them on a cruise, with my mother. None of them had ever been on a cruise before and my sisters had always wanted to go. Mom is a world traveler that hasn't been on a trip outside the USA since November 2007, so I found a couple of inexpensive (great deals this time of year) short cruises to the Bahamas and booked them. I told everyone my one worry about it was the step up (or down when you come out) to the bathrooms in the staterooms.

We started the cruise with Mom and Lannay with very chilly weather, not at all like you'd expect for a cruise to the Bahamas, and we got to Nassau two hours late because right after we left Cape Canaveral, the ship had to return to port to disembark a passenger who had a life-threatening health crisis. We had a good time in Nassau, and at Coco Cay the next day, but Mom's back was bothering her and she seemed to have trouble walking at Cocoa Cay. I thought it was because she had stepped down a large step onto a water taxi too hard.

That night, the last night of the cruise, she got up in the night to use the bathroom and lost her balance. She fell into the bathroom hard and injured her back, but she didn't tell anyone. My sister Lannay, who was sharing the cabin, heard a noise but didn't find anything when she checked and Mom didn't tell her. She later said she didn't want me to know because I'd "have a hemorrhage."

We returned to Cape Canaveral the next morning, Monday the 23rd, and Mom was still having some back pain but not admitting she had fallen. We went to see the Bodies exhibit at MOSI, the Tampa Museum of Science and Industry, and had her in one of their wheelchairs she she didn't have to walk, but didn't know how bad off she was.

The next day, without our knowledge, she went to her doctor and told him about the fall, and had her back x-rayed. It wasn't until the next morning, Wednesday the 25th, that she told Lannay about her fall and by then she was in severe pain. I got another appointment with the doctor that afternoon and we found out she had another compression fracture in her spine. The doctor ordered her to lie flat on her back and to be up as little as possible, but she didn't follow orders and by Thursday she couldn't get up on her own and was in excruciating pain.

I had taken care of Mom when she broke her back with two compression fractures in 1992 and remembered how to get her up and walk her, and I got a wheel chair and walker checked out, but even with me staying there and helping her, by Friday evening the 27th, she was in such terrible pain that we had to call the Emergency Squad to transport her to the South Bay Hospital emergency room. She was admitted to the hospital and put on pain medications, given a CT scan, and the next day an MRI.

On Monday, March 2nd, she had a procedure called kyphoplasty to stabilize the fractured vertebra, but she was still in immense pain. By Wednesday they transferred her to the rehab center at Plaza West here in Sun City Center.

My sister Sherie arrived February 28th and has been so helpful in all the things we had to do for mom at the hospital and rehab center and at her house. I don't know how I would have gotten through this time without her. She was terrific.

All through this, I've been sick with a sinus infection, cough, and nasty sore throat. I've been exhausted, but had to keep going with so much to do. I still haven't unpacked from the cruise.

Today, I took Sherie to the airport. I was so sad to see her go. I really appreciated having her here, not only for all the help, but for the moral and emotional support. She had taken vacation to come here to go on the second cruise, and instead she helped rearrange and clean up at Mom's, visited rehab centers with me, made her own breakfasts and lunches, did dishes, and so much more. I knew I'd miss her when she left, but I wasn't prepared for how all the emotion of the past week and a half would hit me then.

Not only did all my worries about Mom, which had been buried under the work that had to be done, surface, but as it always does when I'm driving alone, the bottomless sadness about missing Leif came pummeling through. I cried all the way home, especially when I passed the exit that would take me to Bay Pines National Cemetery. I've been crying on and off all evening. I just can't shake it. I miss Leif so much! How could nearly 11 months have passed since he died? He helped me out so many times. Who will be there, now that he is not?

We will manage. We have family. We have friends. We are so much more fortunate in so many ways than many in this world, and we know that, but that knowledge doesn't take away the loss.

And I'm so worried about Mom living alone when she gets out of rehab and whether she's going to be able to manage, whether they can get her pain under control, what her future holds. I miss my sisters and having them here to buoy me up. I am so tired, emotionally and physically, still sick.

It will pass. I'll get well. Life will go on.

But so will loss.

I go along, busy, and being busy keeps my mind off things for awhile, but it always floods back. There are two times that it happens most often, when I am driving alone, and when I go outside at night, like taking out the garbage, or going somewhere, and I can see the sky. The night sky and the stars always remind me of Leif and I miss him terribly then.

I miss him terribly now.

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The photo above is of Leif and my mother on December 25, 2005 when he was showing her the cell phone we got her for Christmas . . . his idea.

Leif's 31st Christmas 2005 - Sun City Center, Florida - Almost 31 years old

After Leif's love affair in 2003 and early 2004, when he was so happy, ended, he was miserable in Manhattan and desperate to leave and get out of there. Not only was there little job opportunity for a real career, there were limited opportunities to meet unattached women near his age, and he hated the winters. We were already planning to move to Florida within a few years, and had begun taking him with us on trips to select a location, but we decided to move sooner when we found a place and house we liked, and thought it would help him to get out of Kansas and start a new life.

We moved him to Florida in March 2005, to live with his dad until I could move there permanently once I'd finished my work contract, sold our houses, and moved my mother there, too. He initially seemed to delight in his new surroundings, bought himself a new super fast Suzuki motorcycle, and got a job at Amscot. Things did not work out well for him, though, and by fall he was working at Alltel, which was better for him because he had worked for Western Wireless in Kansas, and Alltel bought them. It gave him some longevity with the company then.

And working for a cell phone company, he thought his grandmother needed a cell phone. He got her the first nice one she had. (I had gotten her a prepaid one in Kansas earlier.) She was flabbergasted. In the photo of the two of them he is showing her how it works.

The other photo of the three of us was taken by my mother. Both were on our lanai, and this was our first Christmas in Florida.

Leif was still depressed and lonely, but much more upbeat and optimistic at that time than he had been in Kansas, and hopeful that a career would work out for him. Peter W. appreciated having him living here.