Saturday, March 29, 2008

Fisher House at Brooke Army Medical Center

This weekend I am in San Antonio on business at a petrochemical conference that starts Sunday afternoon at 430pm. I arrived at 2am on a late flight from Newark and rented a bike at 11 this morning. I rode a north and east then back to the south to Brooke Army Medical Center. I had read several articles about the Center for the Intrepid at Brooke, the places where amputees and other severely wounded soldiers go through rehab. I arrived Saturday at 1pm to the sound of loud music. Crossroads, a local Texas rock band, was playing on the porch at Fisher House and a local group was serving barbeque to soldiers and their families. I talked to a volunteer named Pete Peterson who told me about the place then introduced me Inge Godfrey and Russell Fritz, the manager and assistant manager respectively. Russ gave me a tour. It turns out Inge and I lived in the same military housing area in 1976-77--her husband and I were assigned to the same base in Germany. I am going back tomorrow morning.

"Blindness" by Jose Saramago--terrifying look at society falling apart

  Blindness  reached out and grabbed me from the first page.  A very ordinary scene of cars waiting for a traffic introduces the horror to c...