Good kidney report - Sarah leaves for Beijing - My Johnstown Poem floods across PA

NOTE: The new Google Blogger won't let me write new paragraphs. Wish there were someone I could talk to about this. Dr Ghantous won't let me photograph him so we must settle for this one. He's far handsomer in person. Wears very nice clothes and always terrific shoes. Imagine my surprise when I walked into the exam room and saw a plaque that Phila Mag had named him a Top Nephrologist two years in a row. Certainly the man is smart. Plus he's a gardener. Ruth, he said, why are there so many allergies now when we go outside? Because people are planting exotic non-native plants. Yes, I was sneezing and coffing when I gardened this morning. My goal was to t'plant my hidden hostas, which grow like weeds, to circle around a tree in my front yard.

Ghantous and I discussed my going off prednisone. He said a transplant recipient is never on only one antirejection med, which would leave me only on tacrolimus (Prograf). But he advised me to call Einstein to see if they'll cut the dose in half. Reason I wanna go off is cuz of my insulin-dependent diabetes. My A1C was good - around 6 - and Ghantous advised me to continue eating well and exercising. When my friend Judy Diaz called me to lemme know Terry Gross had a repeat of her interview with the late Maurice Sendak - he died today - and knew, when Terry interviewed him, he wouldn't be long for this world - Judy and I had one of our lengthy conversations. I hopped on my exercise bike and we talked. Judy is moving to Boulder, CO, on July 1, to be w/son Michael and his wife Tory, and I'll never see her again. We can talk on the phone and write real letters to one another!

I told her that diabetes is a life and death matter w/me which is why I take such good c/o myself. "Don't die, Ruthie," she said. "I don't have anyone else to have such enlightening conversations with." We discussed the movie Scott and I watched - Babel - plus the writer Joseph Conrad and his book I just finished Typhoon - we talked about leaving her beautiful condo with her backyard view of her flower garden and the woods beyond it.

Sarah left me a phone message from JFK Airport saying goodbye. She's flying to Beijing via Hong Kong, I believe. She's covering the amateur boxing finals for a couple of newspapers. She raised the airfare and hotel fees thru an online website.

Soon she will land in Beijing airport above. And I am alone in my room. In a previous post I published One of Ours, my poem on a 5-yo flood victim of the 1889 Johnstown Flood. Kullie Mellor, who's in my library book club, suggested I send it to the Johnstown Museum. I did and today a woman named Megan wrote, "It's a lovely poem," may I have your permission to share it with our visitors? Of course, I wrote back. When I first wrote her, I told her I was an adult who wrote the poem. I'd like to publish a poem I wrote about Judy but the format doesn't work right in this new and worse version of Google blogger. To read the poem - and it's awfully good, says the poet who loves her work but can't get anyone to publish it but people she knows - click here. SCROLL WAY WAY DOWN.