Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2007 19:44:57 -0700 (PDT)
From: Kris Gibbons <bookwyrm6@yahoo.com>
Subject: SongSpell Delay

To all my loyal readers and correspondents,

Just a note to let you know that SongSpell is still under way.

About a year and a half ago I underwent an ileocectomy, intended to remove
intestine that had become -- essentially -- scar tissue. The expectation
was that some of the symptoms of Crohn's would abate. This did not
happen. During this year alone I have been 'funding my own room' in the
local hospital's ER at least one time every other month.

More personally pressing; back in June my father died.

Every time I try to convey, verbally or in writing, what a loss that is to
me, I fail abyssmally. This was a mensch. A man with both a courage and a
bravado I cannot approach and a will of diamond. Against the subliminal
training of his generation & family he learned to ask for help when he
needed it, to love with ferocious honesty both his 'queer' son and that
son's partner. The only emotion men of his generation were freely permitted
was anger. My father learned, slowly, to give equal time to the other three
emotions. He thrived despite nearly fifty years as a paraplegic(I can all
but hear him say "Don't make so much out of it. That never got in the way
of the life I tried to make for us all, did it? Its nobody's business
anyway.") and tended wholeheartedly to a second wife who is assailed by MS.

Robert Gibbons had a salacious but gentle sense of humour. He was
irritating, intransigent, vocally opinionated, faithful, cynical, uncannily
perceptive and more irresistible force than immoveable object. A social
chameleon who developed an impatience with B.S., including his own. His
friends were many and diverse and -- in the main -- lifelong. At the
relatively young age of seventy-three, he outlived those he knew the
longest, but they stayed alive in his memory.

So bear with me a little while longer. The story is not on any 'back
burner'.

Cordially As Ever,

Kristopher Gibbons