Yes, kids, I've been in Jackson.

Big Charles (the bird, Charlie, won't go by that name anymore. He prefers Charles, always did, so Little Charles. We all Tennessee Williams in my family), continued to decline. We hiked down an ambulance and went to the local emergency room.

Taking Peg Britton's advice, I didn't leave his side, and found myself at the same hospital he was in before.

Barely known to me, the doctors had been working in his absence, and we have a new diagnosis -- Hodgkins lymphoma, from the Mayo Clinic.

Charles has a rare presentation, where it went straight to the bone, thus the confusion. But it isn't that rare, it's exactly the disease that killed that son of a bitch my grandfather (the one who kept my pretty mother in the cotton field).

I gave the doctors a ton of necessary information, and now we have a treatment protocol. They're happy, and so am I.

I'm back in Jackson on Tuesday.