Bye-bye, bootie. Dr. Polun cleared me today to wear regular shoes. I'm grateful to have had the boot, because it enabled me to walk again. But it sure is nice to have shoes that weight the same -- never mind the esthetics of looking alike. I can begin to feel the toes on the right foot bending slightly as in a normal pace.   

The 2012 Olympics are beginning, and Claudia is driving down to Charlottesville early tomorrow to see the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection.











I would love to have gone with her, but discretion said that walking two extensive exhibits at a museum might be a bit much.

Better to pace it. Maybe I'll bus down to the National Gallery tomorrow and see if I can do a gallery or two.


I've been trying too to continue making peace with the loss of part of the second toe. OK, my salutation to my niece Liz was: Hang 10, and I'll hang 9.6.

The visiting nurse, Shirl, told me she did not want to lose her molars. I was ok with the molars going, and the wisdom teeth. My toe...that's something else.

An idea in a book by theologian Jerry Korsmeyer is helpful. Writing about immortality -- affirmed in the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the divine promise to us of life beyond our life on this earth -- Korsmeyer points out that our individual experiences here occur in little units of time. As each experience reaches completion or satisfaction, he suggests, it is taken into the divine life.

"The divine life is constantly receiving the lives of everyone in the world, and adding each moment to all the collected moments of their past. All these moments are experienced in God with no loss of intensity or immediacy," he writes in Evolution and Eden. "The past of the world enters the everlasting present of the divine immediacy. The world is transformed in God, who weaves everything that is worthwhile into a greater harmony, a greater whole." Evils, he says, are dismissed into the triviality of individual facts, reduced to insignificance in terms of the divine harmony.

I do not think that what has befallen my toe is evil. It is a biological fact in the context of the biological fact of pre-diabetes. It is a sadness to me. But if my completed half toe can be taken into the divine life of God -- what an honor. What a blessing.

And not only the physical fact of the half toe, but the completed processes and procedures that have attended to this wound care by these fine people -- doctors, nurses, hyperbaric oxygen people, physical therapists -- all the good work of these good people and the friends and family who have given me support, their kindnesses...if all of these experiences can be offered to God to be taken into God's very life...our small steps are woven into the lasting harmony of God's love and providence.

Julia said: You got a toe in the door.


Photos: Da boot; Claudia, Julia, me at the 2011 Landon School azalea festival; Liz.


7/27/12