Pictured above are my bride and me on the way to our wedding reception. The date was December 30, 1967. The place: Providence, Rhode Island. We were 23 years old and without a care in the world. I was half way through Georgetown Law and didn’t have a penny to my name. But we had a plan. Natalie was a psych nurse working on a locked ward at the Washington Hospital Center making $4800 a year. Problem solved or so we thought.

I had midterm exams coming up right after the New Year. So, when we left the reception, we drove to New York City where we stayed overnight, and then continued on to Arlington, Virginia where we had rented a $90 per month apartment.

The day after we moved in, doctors detected a suspicious lump in Natalie’s breast. I took her to Georgetown Hospital for a biopsy. In those days, this was a major undertaking. She was an inpatient for five days. We had health insurance of a sort, but were told that we had to come up with the $500 deductible.

It might as well have been a million.

But then Natalie’s parents arrived in Washington to save the day. I recall having lunch with them in the restaurant where I had tended bar and waited tables as an undergraduate. Her father, a brilliant and accomplished lawyer, told me not to worry about the expense.

“George,” he said, “you haven’t been married a week. As far as I’m concerned, she’s still under warranty.”

Like I said, he was a great lawyer.

This turned out to be the first of numerous serious medical issues and illnesses that Natalie and I have faced together over 55 years.

Over the past 12 weeks, Natalie has been hospitalized five times which has left her weak and exhausted. In the middle of that, I underwent surgery to correct a painfully debilitating bulging lumbar disc. I’m not allowed to stretch, twist, lift more than 10 pounds, exercise or do much of anything. I am gobbling oxycodone tabs like M&Ms. This has greatly limited my ability to care for Natalie.

It has also prevented me from tending to this blog.

I’m hopeful that, by early November, we will be well enough to return to normal, and I will be able to resume writing. It is beyond frustrating not to be able to comment about unfolding national and world events.

So please stand by. I hope to be back on these pages soon.

Oh, as for Natalie’s 1967 biopsy, it turned out to be benign.

Stay well.