BREAD, PUPPETS, FAMILY AND KIDNEYS

Mary Beth (MB) and I won't be having a long vacation together this summer. We just returned from a two-day visit with an old Florida friend whose family has had a cabin for several generations on a beautiful lake south of St. Johnsbury, Vermont. Our friend Smitty Hooper, who lives most of the year in Cocoa Beach near Cape Canaveral, was one of the few locals in that "space community" who helped us organize the many protests at the space center over many years. Smitty comes to the Vermont lake cabin each summer and invited us to make the four-hour drive over for a visit. Due to our extremely busy schedules we could only go for the past two days.

The lake is quite beautiful and we went canoeing to the far end of the lake after we arrived. We heard loons making their wondrous calls.

Yesterday we went for a long walk around part of the lake and then in the afternoon the three of us drove an hour north to Glover, Vermont and went to the Bread & Puppet Theatre museum. I'd been there once before, about 10 years ago, and wanted MB to see it. The museum, in an old worn out barn, is just striking in the beauty and creativity of the puppets that have been used by the troupe to do their political street theatre over many years time. We picked up a couple very nice posters they had made and left a good donation on the way out. There is no admission charge at the museum.

This morning MB and I had to get up at 6:00 am so we could get on the road early to get back home. The road was covered in fog and the sun was barely visible as the fog surrounded the rising orb.

MB's brother from Boston, and his partner, were coming up to visit today and on Friday they will drive us back to Boston for a wedding of one of their favorite cousins. MB has been asked to do the wedding ceremony and the family had to get special permission from the state to allow her to legally do the officiating of the wedding.

On Sunday MB will head out to Tucson, Arizona to visit her other brother and sister-in-law who live in the southern border town of Bisbee. Her "sister" Ana has been struggling with cancer for several years and is very close to MB. I will take the train back to Maine and return to work.

MB will stay in Arizona for a week and miraculously then fly to Florida where she will take a full-blown battery of medical tests to see if she can donate her kidney to my sister Laura. I had tried to see if I could donate a kidney but was the wrong blood type. As it turned out MB is the compatible blood type. So if not completely worn out by all that travel MB will hopefully be able to save Laura from the whole kidney dialysis treatment scene.

It looks like I won't then see MB until after Sept 10 because I leave for the UK on August 28 for a speaking tour and the September 1 space conference in London. So we just had our mini-summer vacation together!