I visited Phoebe in Rome over the weekend, taking the noon bus up Saturday and coming back Sunday morning. She had just bought more and more little things..dollar store type stuff...and her apartment needs a good clearning. The RHA people will be after us again, I am sure. The best way to handle it has been to go up with Rob and deal with it...throwing out stuff...throwning out a lot of stuff.

She had wanted to do a barbeque, and seems to have walked up to CVS, had somebody bring a small bargeque...no coals though....and while there she feel and gave her knee a really bad scrape.

I let her borrow the Mavica and she took quite a few very nice pictures, especially of children playing....in a very short time. She also did some shots of neighbor's yars, including those flamingos...and some flowers.

The sound on her television was not working..watched a captioned film, and also started reading an interesting book about ancient Greece..a fairly short introduction, and very interesting.

Spent Thursday afternoon with a marathon of moves..some I had seen, some not, and finished off with 2 Britcoms...

v I think she asked me to sit by me so she would have a safe oldist white lady sitting next to her instead of a Mexican with a baby or a tattoed black man.

I was aboslutely amazed at how she set out her entire autobioraphy to a lady across the aisle in a short half hour. She was born near Chatanooga, an only child. She repeated this several times. Her parents were older when she came along which she considered an advantage.

At seven she was enrolled in drama classes at the local conservatory, started high school young enough to graduate at age 15, and was a cheerleader, but also dressed by her mother as still a child...and Bob, who remained a lifelong friend,...took up for her.

Slated to go to Emerson in Boston, instead she was recruited for a Methodist college in Iowa looing to have every state represented in ints student body....and she prepared to become a speech therapy teacher.

She married in the midwest. Must have been a dutiful daughter, because she wrote weekly to her mother-in-law and continued after her husband's death. She wanted to return south, an her husband got a job in Knoxville.

There were three children, one a journalist-public relations Replican in Washingon, now thankfully married with a daugher named Savannah...married a second time after an unfortunate 3 monthn first marriage to a nurse who quit her job...end of marriage. ...A daughter with a doctorate, two children 14 and 16, dean of a jr college in Alabama, and another son.

Husband died, but she draws a pension, has health insurance on his account, and after retiring from one job, took a second in Griffin Georgia and last year retired from that.

She lives with her schnauzer and pookle in a small aparment in her daughter's town...but is feeling it is hard to make friends easily in a new town. However, she may have a job teaching English at night in the junior college, or even a switchboard job at the local hospital.

She has traveled with an educators group to Europe and hopes to do so again.

She wanted to let her congressman know her dissatifaction with the bus starting late "no competition"....and said she had organized a letter writing campain in a cafe among passangers when a similar thing happened on an air flight.

Why was this lady traveling ? She was going to a cousin's funderal in Chatannoga...She had arranged her wardrobe so she couls switch her slacks to a skirt with minimum effort. She knew that there would be food a the funeral home. She could have driven but did not feel comfortalbe making the long car trip, nor did she want to wait for her daughter to get back from a meeting to take her.