My internet connection is now new and improved, and I can actually get some work done. That also means I can stream my Pandora stations at will and I find that I keep going to the same one. My two dozen stations range from Big Band music to Mariachi music, from Tex-Mex to Reggaeton, from Disco to R&B. Yet I find myself going to the same Reggae/Bob Marley station. I must be homesick.

Amazingly, it’s been two weeks since I left home. Things are easier now; a routine has developed and though I’ve had to dip into the honey/poison jar (the Prednisone bottle) all is going fairly well.  Carmen and I have acclimated and assimilated to each other, with each other?

We are forming a new and improved bond. The kind that naturally results from daily exposure to each other. She keeps my day full till Mom and Dad come home in the evening, but she also keeps my heart full with her smiles, her hugs and her remarkable comprehension skills. Babies must be new and improved nowadays as well.

I miss my other grandchild tremendously. Though by now I usually see her only once or twice a week, I was her main caregiver during her first two years of life and that bond, that tether, will never be broken or weakened as long as my heart beats, and perhaps even beyond. When my daughter sent me this picture, it gave me a visceral pang.

Celebrating at a birthday party.

Of course there is the one person to whom I’ve been tethered to for more than half my life. And though that bond has waned and intensified during the peaks and valleys as the years passed, it seems to remain unbroken.

One of the first things we found we had in common was our love of Reggae. Me, from a little Texas town, and he, from the big city of L.A., somehow connected on a little island in the Gulf of Mexico and discovered many shared likes and dislikes. It was the strangest thing, to find a person who for some reason thinks like you.

That first night, we met at a Disco no less, was spent talking on the phone till the sun came up. Now some of the Marley songs take me right back to that time. He’s not taking my absence well. But lucky for him, I have to make a quick trip home next week, when, I suppose, we shall reinforce that tether.

Meanwhile I dedicate this song to him.