Some days you eat the alligator. . .

This has been a very up/down/up week. The day after the Guthrie, Thankful's sister called with the news that her only brother, Rene, was in ICU in Chicago, and that it did not look good. We took off for Chicago.

I had felt that perhaps being in ICU again was going to be, to say the least, difficult. It was, but not as I might have expected. Rather because it was hard watching Thankful going through what I'd been through, and being unable to really help. Unable to make things different for her.

In the end, I didn't have to: Rene did it himself, and began to improve on his own. By Thanksgiving night, he was doing well enough that we made plans to come back to Minnesota yesterday. And did, stopping in LaCrosse to eat alligator ( I ordered the crawdad etouffee, but both Bob and Thankful shared their alligator with me. . . ).