THREE LAPS!!! Back in form.
I’m a little tired, but I really feel good. I had PT this morning and it took until mid-afternoon to recover from that, then the walk tonight… oomph! Nothing to do except hang out until Thursday (more labs), then PT again on Friday. Tony and I played some set-back this afternoon… we’re going to keep score until he leaves, then settle up… nickel a point, double in spades. I told him I wanted him to put some money into an escrow account so I’d be sure to get paid at the end.
We used to have a regular game every Friday night and we rotated houses… Tony, me, Rich Jacovino, P.J. Conway, My father-in-law and Tony’s father and father-in-law… 7 of us. We played the same game, cutthroat. It was a great game and no one drank anything except Pepsi. At the end of the game there was the requisite box of Dunkin Donuts. Russ Baim showed up one night and sat in for a few hands… we emptied his pockets in short order. He vowed never to play with us again!
“Hey Brian, this could be an opportunity to get back at your brother-in-law. Challenge him to a game.”
I was never a big board game person… I failed at chess and was never good at checkers, even the Chinese kind. Tony Marks can tell a story about the day he cleaned my clock at Cribbage… UGH! However, I have gotten pretty god at Backgammon. It’s been a couple of years since I played, but Tony’s got the app on his iPad2 and we’ve played a couple of games. It didn’t take long to get back into the swing. I even remembered the good rolls and the awful rolls.
The last couple of comments I’ve gotten about Waterbury and food were about the Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel… OH what a food orgy! I worked the “Feast” from the time I was about 10. At first helping sweep the lot the morning after… Tommy Lacila would give us a dollars’ worth of food tickets for working all morning. Of course there were probably 20 kids doing the same thing. And, I worked the soda booth at night. By the time I was 15 I was working in the kitchen during the day… helping the ladies cook the sauce, the veal and peppers and the soffritto; mixing the dough for the fritto apizza (fried apizza). It was a labor of love and because my grandmother also worked there, there was no shortage of pinched cheeks.
The nights were spent hanging with the kids from the hill, listening to the Carmen Champion Band play old standards and a tarantella, too. Someone who had too much beer would always grab his spouse (or not his spouse) and start dancing! I once actually had the opportunity to sit in for a set with my accordion. No “Lady of Spain” though. Bummer. Of course, it wouldn't be complete without the procession through the streets of Town Plot on Sunday afternoon... there would be what seemed like hundreds of seminarians, priests, and nuns from all over who came to walk the route. We alter boys had to do it too... hot sunny July day, long cassocks... couldn't wait to shed them.
See you Friday… are there 4 laps in my future?
Woo hoooo!
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