I appreciated my time last night, Saturday night.  Though my college football picks this weekend were of the epic-loser proportion (5 winners and 5 losers), I still had fun watching football yesterday and last night.

My dear wife, Carrie, and I spent some time with my grandmother last night.  A former Louisiana resident, I have no doubt she wanted Louisiana State to beat my beloved Ole Miss in Baton Rouge.  Granny was diplomatic.  She has always been good at being diplomatic…well…at least about a few things.  Anyway, there we were watching the Tigers beat the Rebels 10 to 7.

While we are never given a solid on how many Saturday nights we are going to get to spend with each other, I paid close attention to the time we spent with Granny last night.  You see, earlier in the day there were a couple of ladies from an entity called Hosparus .  These are wonderful folks that help a person when they have been told they have an illness they are likely not going to recover from.  They are probably going to die soon.  Such is the case with my grandmother, Coralyn Floreta Johnson.  Granny is 89.

Granny, as I said in an earlier post, has had some blood issues.  Platelets. Hemoglobin. White Count.  Lack of production when being stuck for a sample is something I witnessed while she was in the hospital for a few days.

Ultimately, Granny was told she has leukemia.  It was no shock to any of us.  It did, however, bring a source of gravity in play that was not there the five minutes before we got some sort of “official word”…whatever that means.

What it means to me is that Granny is not going to get better.  She is going to get worse.  I pray she does not have a difficult time with the physical aspects of her illness.  I can tell you her heart’s vitality is still strong.  One of the great things I can say about Granny is that she hasn’t grown old.  She has gotten older.  She still acts like a kid at heart.  I am so thankful for that and I hope to hang onto some of those traits myself, if I can.

I’ll give you a prime example:

On Friday evening Carrie and I were visiting Granny at the hospital.  In the hospital room we were watching a college football game between the University of Cincinnati and South Florida.

There was Granny.  She was being tended to by a nursing assistant.  This young lady had a monitor on Grannny’s finger, a blood pressure cuff around Granny’s arm, and a thermometer in Granny’s mouth as she was trying to listen to Granny’s lungs and heart.  All this time Granny was trying to look around the nursing assistant so she could see the ballgame.  When Gunner Kiel, the quarterback of Cincinnati,  took off for the end zone on long run, Granny took she thermometer out of her mouth long enough to declare to me, “He’s gone Danny!”

Pardon me for saying…but it just doesn’t get much better than that, given where we were and why we were there.

I am most grateful to Gunner Kiel for taking off for the end zone.

Speaking the rights.

Danny Johnson