Jeff's Journal

Weston Heads Home

It is Sunday night and Weston and I are in a hotel near London’s Heathrow Airport. I don’t know how we got here. I had Internet instructions to the hotel from Oxford. However, Maidenhead was not in the instructions. Somehow we got lost. Imagine that. (I’ve been lost all over Europe this summer.) Fortunately, there were some helpful people with very good instructions. The hotel manager says we are only 15 minutes from Heathrow. I guess we will schedule about an hour to get there given my record.


Weston has helped me navigate around the UK and all over northern Europe. I will miss his ability to get me to destinations, but I will miss his company much more than his navigation. I have had a great time just being with him. We drove from Paris to Marseille to The Netherlands with some great adventures collected along the way. (Did I mention I was driving and I’ve been lost?)


He has endured my picture taking, sitting in on meetings with missionaries as we make plans for trips next summer, sitting at the Angus Library at Oxford University while I went about organizing reading and he has been very patient through it all. He has been patient about getting his license, too. He turned sixteen while we were in Paris and has been waiting almost two weeks. The waiting is over on Tuesday!

I have trouble believing he is sixteen years old. Tomorrow morning, he gets on a plane to Houston by himself. In a couple of years, he will take the license he gets this week and get in a car and drive off to college to some destination towards his future.

These past couple of weeks with him has been wonderful for me to check in with him. I realized during this time how much energy the disease took from my life. The time it took to feel better (and then doing dialysis) was not only time stolen from my life, but also stolen from my family. I can get a little angry if I linger on it, but these past weeks have been good for reinvesting in the important accounts of life.

posted by Jeff Waldo @ 3:24 PM