Ups and Downs

What a roller-coaster of a day. We had a great weekend - got a lot of stuff done, I got to watch the Daytona 500 which had a really good finish and a really good guy won it. Got started on an interesting new painting yesterday. Today the news reported that Castro was resigning (yay!), and the Pakistani elections went off well and Musharaf got beat (a very very important yay!). Then I got a phone call from a dear old friend of mine. He has inoperable pancreatic cancer. Doctors give him four to six months to live.

Damn.

News like this just takes all the wind out of your sails. We all have to go sometime, but most of us don't know how soon. So we all go about our lives as if we have unlimited time left. Some of us, though, do find out how long they have left. This isn't a comforting feeling. In six more months, a man that taught me a lot about art will (probably) no longer be here.

And what is it with cancer lately? I've now had four friends come down with different versions in the past fifteen months. Two caught it early and are well on the road to recovery, thank God. One died. And Gary, unfortunately, is going to leave us as well.

But Gary isn't moping. He's still his ornery self, determined to pack as much in as he can. So I'm not going to write his obituary in this blog. Not yet. Not as long as the sumbitch is still planning a trip to Paris!