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9/14（日本語は後に続きます）

We have been busy for the past two days in a very normal sense. My son who is a college junior is leaving for Scotland for a year on Friday, and Mark and I are trying to help him (actually yell at him, in my case) to tie up loose ends.

We just came back from the mall, after purchasing a cheap set of suitcases for him. We are going to a local breakfast place tomorrow morning, the place where we used to take our sons when we needed to talk during their teenage years.

Trivial things give me an utmost sense of happiness. It is precious to be able to go shopping for my son with Mark without feeling tired, and to be able to go out for breakfast to really eat! In a very strange way, I am grateful for my state, because I can truly find happiness in small things.

In corporate America, the chairwoman of the board of HP (Hewlett-Packard), is under scrutiny for spying on its director’s personal phone records as well as journalists to find out who has been leaking the inside information to the media.

The Chairwoman, Patricia Dunn, while working on the board, suffered from breast cancer (2000), melanoma (2002), stage IV (terminal) ovarian cancer (2004), and a malignant tumor in the liver (operation only last month.)

Her will power and tenacity must be a thing to admire for many people. I feel sorry for her, however. It is awful to get a malady like cancer, but it makes you pause to look at things differently, to appreciate things more, and discover that there is so much goodness in our lives. You rediscover your family, your friends, nature, and your own strength. It does not mean that you are weak if you take a leave from your work.

I hope that she will have a few moments to pause and feel this new appreciation in spite of her state now. She has fought so much with the disease.

I went to a barber yesterday, the one that Mark goes to, and had him cut my hair very short, a crew cut. While cutting the hair of the customer before me, the barber was talking with him about a customer who was recently diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. Consequently it was a little awkward to ask him to cut my hair for my upcoming surgery.

Is it only us who feel that cancer is like epidemic these days? Everywhere we go, we seem to hear someone has fallen to the cancer.