Flight School

The anniversary of my first year as a blogger slipped by without my noticing.  I guess I started around January 24 of 2006.

aircraftI think I will honor the occasion by complaining.

It has been one miserable year or rather year and a half.

About then—a year and a half ago—WB started acting out with violence towards the caretaker they had at the time and at Joan too, and poor Steve had to call in a 5150—which is California code for a danger to himself or others, and they had to come and take him away, screaming the whole time and fighting Steve says.  Then he went to the VA hospital, and we made visits to that and the brothers and I talked and tried to figure out what to make of the situation since this was all new territory for all of us.

But he couldn’t stay in a VA hospital forever, so he was shipped out to a “home” and I visited there a couple of times.  It was not a pleasant place and WB kept talking about all he could do was cry like a baby and that he was in hell.  Also God gave him spelling tests at night.  Senile dementia.

And then he died in his sleep on February 7.  Joan apparently insisted on a “viewing” at the morgue even though he was to be cremated and that was apparently awful because WB looked and was frozen like a popsicle.

And then there was the funeral at a Presbyterian Church in Escondido and         quite a number of people showed up that I had not seen in years and a number of bricklayers from the union.  And the Preacher read this thing about WB that had some truth in it but some outright lies because Joan had told him what to say and she claimed that she was the one who made all the block for the adobe house.  The hell, you say.  That is and was one lazy woman, and she didn’t make a single damn block.  I mean why the hell would a person tell lies to the Preacher about her husband to flatter herself at her husband’s funeral.

You know what.  I have managed to write so far only about six months or so of this last year and a half and as far as I am concerned all that crap was enough for two years right there.

Oh, that’s WB in an aircraft.  He washed out of flight school.  Then he got Valley Fever and was sick for a while, and then the war was about over though he was in for the duration, and that included some clean up in Europe.  But Joan says she wrote directly to FDR and said that WB couldn’t go.  Who knows, maybe FDR had heard about Joan and decided not to fight it.  He died soon after that.  FDR, I mean.