!A wake of smiles --- agk's diary 10 February 2022 @ 18:22 --- written on GPD Win 1 at College of Nursing in a study room: boots off, feet on table --- Sloum@colorfield wondered about gopher writers' physical culture. This week I walked four miles up the creek to the cow pasture and home again. I held my 20 lb baby in one arm, spouse held other hand. We walk often, and wrestle now and then. I walked down from hospital 11th floor to ground, up to College of Nursing 6th floor, down again. It's a mile to where I park. Danced up a lather in the kitchen with baby. Slow-dance hefted patients to and from beds, commodes, and recliners. Ran across a snowy courtyard to help break up a brawl between children. In the hospital I get to be in the presence of love that lends humor, grace, generosity, and sweetness to every little thing. Mom's parents loved like that. So do Charlie and Lynn. > When I tell hospital stories, I invent composite > patients. You can't ID who I assembled them from. Lynn, in camo jacket and bluejeans, watched while physical therapy carefully ambulated her husband in the hall. "He's doing good," I said. "You taking him home to- morrow?" "He ain't got long, does he? The cancer went from his kidney to his liver and lung, maybe his brain, doctor said." I confirmed her understanding of what the doctor said. "I need a hospital bed. Can't get him in and out of ours by myself," Lynn said. She described her house and how Charlie'll live in it as he is. We celebrated when she, surprised, learned the bed was being delivered. We celebrated and laughed when Charlie finally had a big bowel movement and wryly farted a lot. His abdomen deflated some from the procedure that inflated it with air and distended it so grotesquely. Lynn's phone rang: now her sister's in the hospital too. Covid and bad pneumonia. Charlie, sclera and skin jaundiced yellow, told me haltingly about the plant employed his dad and him; how his dad died of kidney cancer last year. Charlie and Lynn are brightly, sweetly in love no matter what. They chuckled and marked events together, structuring time. They delighted in one another. The day he dies will be like a leaf reaching the forest floor where it may rest. I hope to live and die like them: gruff, chuckling, unpretentious, leaving a wake of smiles.