Hi, Sandi! Been thinking about you... so good to get an email!
My address is at the bottom of all my emails, here it is again. You can also get photos put on a CD and send them out by email, even if the camera isn't digital (I think). I don't know when I'm coming back... seems like no reason to right now, especially since I had planned to for Feb 15th - cold, cold - but I can ask Les to scan them and send them I hope. Sometimes he does fulfill a request or two for me.
How have you been? I'm quitting the pain pills for my back so that I can come back to life and also won't need to go back every three months for a refill; the muscle relaxers were a really good change - lifted depression quite a bit - but the big one is harder. Was fine for two days - the first full two days without them being the last two days - but I felt so good I walked all along the shore of Lake Atitlan to a very nice restaurant yesterday. Lots of the standard back strain pain today, so broke down and took a half a pill and went to bed and am up and a bit better now. Have a massage appt. tomorrow which I hope will help.
Andrea, the masseuse, is German and studied physical therapy and it's practically - it IS - a "spiritual experience" going there, in her massage room high up in the trees, overlooking the mountain and a waterfall, and Lake Atitlan when you go up further on the roof. She is married to Nunio, a Brazilian architect who has designed lots of gorgeous houses here in Panajachel, and she has two wonderful children and she is always laughing and smiling and has a "real life" here, not just my alone-life that I have, in the "latter years" having retired from what? so it's very good to be there, to remind me that some people have happiness and a real life, after all. And that maybe one day I could achieve it, too.
So all in all the depression is starting to lift, in part because the pills are leaving my system (I tell myself anyway) and I am forcing myself to get up and out a bit more each day. I was two weeks ill with intestinal flu and la grippe, so being outside now in the sun and the light is magical beyond belief. "I AM ALIVE" and I can hardly believe it's so.
I've been reading every spiritual book I have, which is (too) many that I ended up bringing over here each time, and a whole bunch of trashy beach novels that I just love - have never read these kind before, not in ages and ages - that I can trade in for at the local English bookstore. They certainly raise my spirits as well. But it's very lonely at times; incredibly different now that I am planning on staying here more "permanently" and will be on a much stricter financial budget at some point in time.
It's amazing how everything has changed in just a few weeks, thinking about how I could be staying here for a long, long time - and for the first time the lonelies have really gotten to me. I can't imagine another relationship after the disaster of the last thirty years; Les and I still get along well by telephone and email, and as long as we don't have any financial doings together we can share the same house just fine, but it's practically my whole adult life down the tubes as far as I can see, and I did it to myself. Always waiting and wondering "why" he would do the crazy things he would do, never knowing about Asperger's or believing the behavior that I saw each and every day.
Always living in the future, "it will be better then..." and I can see that this is exactly how I have lived my entire life, ever since I was a child waiting and waiting to be able to leave that horrible house that I grew up in and was finally legally released at the too-young but absolutely necessary age of the tender sixteens. Then, not a little more than two or three years later, there I was found myself in NYC and the Gaslight. I can hardly believe it. So much water under the bridge, but it's so good to be able to write TO YOU after all these years.
I still love what you said about "you can't go back and re-live your life no matter how hard you try," and I read that email all the time to remind myself of this. I know that this stage is the - I hope - final stage of "regret" for the lost years of my life, going back so many years I can hardly count. I know that time brings all kinds of surprises, so I am waiting for (another) one to come this way. After all, who would have thought that I would end up here right now? Now, that's a surprise!
Went to the open-air market with Georgina today and as usual, had a great time. She really is getting old now and her memory is failing a lot more in the last year than I had seen before. So I hope I can start helping out at the hotel on a regular basis starting next week. Just to give her a break and go with her to the market and carry and check the list... we had to get another tuc-tuc (open sided three wheeled golf-cart type taxi) and go back for dog food and a whole bunch of other things. I always enjoy going with her anywhere. I prayed for years for my grandmother to come back to me and she did, in the form of Georgina. I always smile when I say her name.
So with that I will close; let me know what is on your always-full plate!
Your friend, Katie
NC address below:
--
Catherine Todd
3007 Bent Tree Dr. Oxford NC 27565
H 919.693.0853 U.S. cell 919.605.0727,
GUA cell (dial 011 from the U.S.) 502.5013.6300
For 2008:
"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change
something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."
— R. Buckminster Fuller, *Critical Path*
Words to live by: "Best of all is to preserve everything in a pure, still heart, and let there be for every pulse a thanksgiving, and for every breath a song." ~ Konrad von Gesner
On Jan 17, 2008 11:11 AM, sandi sylver <sandisylver@yahoo.com> wrote:
I HAVE BEFORE & AFTER PIX TO SEND YOU...I NEED YOUR SNAIL MAIL ADDRESS! (more later) xoxoxoxox
Sandi Sylver (and "the Girls") Storyteller-Ventriloquist-Songstress
ILLINOIS ARTS COUNCIL ARTSTOUR ROSTER ARTIST
(Find out if your school/library/preschool qualifies for a grant to hire me!)
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