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24

dent on our families. We did have a great deal to be thankful for. I felt that all I needed personally to complete an otherwise happy picture was harmony within myself. I was still too much at war with myself, dissatisfied with my game--selfish, thoughtless, inconsiderate, worried, lacking faith. I felt that once I could overcome these moods, I'd at last be able to live fully.
   A few days after the above philosophizing, we had a rude shock to the idea we were all in fine health. Willie nearly fainted one morning and felt extremely low for awhile. Dr. McCallum came out and by that time she was better. He examined her thoroughly and attributed her near-fainting spell to an abnormally long menstruation caused apparently by a slight misplacement of the uterus which he said he would correct. He said she was fine otherwise and we all felt much better about her. But it had been a shock.
   The month of December drifted on toward year's end. Christmas came and went. Rog was too young for his first Christmas to mean anything to him and Bab was by now a veritable veteran so I find nothing in my diary about it. However, everything appears to have been going well at home. On December 28th we experienced a strange weather phenomenon which inspired me to some thoughts of what it's all about. The entire city was enveloped in a heavy fog all day. The sun shone through the mist, a great red disc. Seeing it that way with its outline distinct made it more real to me somehow. And then I indulged in some thinking that was based upon the 1932 concept of the origin of the solar system, at least one of the popular concepts of that period. To me, it was a staggering thought that we probably came from the sun--the very stuff of our bodies, our world, was once part of that great glowing mass eons ago. And our world had been only a tiny drop off the sun's great globe as it came through space. And what a marvelous thing that inherent in that white hot drop as it hurtled away from the sun those vast ages ago, was the germ of life, the stuff for the evolution of our world, Life and all else. Such a train of thought always staggered me and led me to deeply significant appreciations.
   Perk came to dinner that same night and Bab was greatly excited, wearing her apron all the afternoon to keep her dress clean. However, poor Rog had on a turban to keep him from scratching his head, which had been scaling badly and finally had been scratched open in several places. Other than to make him a little fussy, however, this didn't seem to affect his health. We weighed him the following day, fearful that his complaint might have held him back, but he tipped the scale at eighteen pounds fourteen ounces, a gain of nine ounces in a week, and his head was much better also. At age seven months, Rog was indeed a real bruiser at this weight. At the same time, he was "absolutely the most adorable thing ever created." He must have been something if he surpassed Babbie at that age.