Bill was back at work today. They're thinking type 2 diabetes, he says, although they're not really sure yet. Type 2 is the kind you can often manage with diet or diet and pills, although I suspect none of it is altogether easy. One thing I hadn't understood - diabetes symptoms here - is that Bill had lost 35 pounds in the last two weeks. He was thinking it was the flu, wheezing and sneezing and peeing, but it was his body not being able to metabolize sugar and therefor making do by metabolizing itself. Cells eating cells. Hell of a way to lose thirty five pounds. Anyway, he looked fine, his first act being to hand me a full box of peanut butter cookies he had stashed in his desk (no more peanut butter cookies when you have diabetes, I guess) which I put out on a table for passers by. This is a week I'm looking to lose a couple of pounds of my own and a peanut butter cookie ambush early in the week was avoided, but narrowly. Narrowly.

My grandfather, who died at the age of 39, died, the story goes, of diabetes. Later there was some suggestion of diabetes and alcohol. This is the male side of the family and both my sister and I learned very young not to trust any of the family histories, vague stories that were related to us occasionally, mostly by our mother, but each story a little different and sometimes a lot different and sometimes antithetical. Diabetes? Alcohol? We know something of the line back to the 1850's when they came over from Denmark, but little of their likes and wants and habits. Except for one of their (our) diseases. We think. Diabetes and alcohol, we're told, don't mix when you're 39.

And so the day progressed. A day of meetings and putting out fires, little fires, but fires. A day to welcome back a coworker diagnosed with diabetes, a day to have lunch at a Cambodian restaurant (The house noodle soup. Three shrimp, two fish balls and a submerged bird's nest made out of egg noodles. Good stuff. Still thinking about those two pounds, you'll notice.) No photographs. Lunch with Bill and Mark and Ola and Beth, all of whom I've shot so many times they don't roll their eyes anymore and the camera on the table has become something like a hat or gloves or glasses, an inanimate and ordinary object, not much need to pay attention when I pick it up and look through the viewfinder.