Day +70 "Happiness is a Warm Gun, Mama"

70 days folks!!!  30 more and I am outta here!

As I mentioned in my last post (sorry for the length of time between posts) it’s been a very “messy” week. I finally got off the Neupogen which was causing my lower back pain, and as expected there was some residual effects… weakness, tiredness. But I finally got back up to two laps (yesterday and today). We’ll shoot for three tomorrow.

Tony S., Ruth Ann’s cousin, is staying with me for a week and a half while Ruth Ann attends her last ESL course back in Orlando. Becky needed a break, too, and she’s back in the research department at Disney. We got some really good news this week, Becky will be going to Hawaii on business for the pre-opening of the new Disney resort on Oahu. She’s excited and as expected she’s starting the work now… almost two months before she goes. I wish I could go, too, as do Ruth Ann and Sean.

One of my neighbors left for Afghanistan two weeks ago. He’s a helicopter pilot doing casualty extraction… hope they’re not out of “hot” LZ’s. I was thinking about Viet Nam, and when you combine it with Hawaii, all I can think of is the trip from Travis AFB in Oakland, CA. It was a long trip; we stopped in Hawaii, Guam, Wake and Manila before we landed in Bien Hoa airbase in Saigon. I was with Ernie, who never passed up a chance to get a little lit. When we landed in Honolulu, we had an hour and a half and they let us off the plane… straight to the lounge and started sucking down the  scotches as fast as we could, for fear there wasn’t any in Viet Nam.

Needless to say, there was a tense moment when we discovered that finding the boarding gate was a lot harder than we thought… especially when we were holding each other up. Quite a sight… two drunken 2^nd Lieutenants, desperately in search of the gate.  We found it, boarded the plane and didn’t see another drink until we got to Viet Nam. We met Bobby Schwartz( a friend from Fort Gorden), and he directed us to the nearest officer’s club (a ramshackle building, as I recall), but the beer was cold. And all of us were there for the duration. As I said, counting down from 100 is a lot easier than 365.

Say a prayer for Rod, that he comes safely home to his family.

Day +66 “Here Comes That Rainy Day”

 

Sorry I haven’t written in a while; it’s been a messy couple of days. My counts are really in the tooter… white blood cells, red blood cells, platelets, etc. I’ve had to get the Neupogen shot every day, including this morning… that’s five days in a row. We have to continue until at least Wednesday when we’ll have some more blood drawn and see where we are. Everything else seems to be OK, and the drug that’s causing this is on hold for a while.

We did have a good day yesterday; Gene and Judy, neighbors and Posse members came over for the afternoon. The got here about 12:30 and we sat around and caught up on stuff in the neighborhood. Judy also brought dinner… a southwest chicken breast stuffed with cheese and Anaheim chilies… a real winner for sure. Then they (actually Gene) entertained us with “Herman” a wooden, triple jointed doll, that danced for us to some Bluegrass banjo picken’ music… what a hoot.

I’m still getting comments from Waterbury folks on the beach thing; Pete K. (another Croft High grad… and UCONN, too) had cousins who had a place in Milford and he spent a lot of time there. Pete also reminded me of “Cruisin’ the Green” and how much gas we must have wasted going up and down East and West Main Streets. Even if you were just passing through, we always made at least one (sometimes two) passes… just to see who was around. Then there were the hangouts… Farm Shop, Park Dairy, Tower Grill, and the downtown places, Jenlocks and the Wooster pool parlors, Handy Kitchen, Ken’s near Sacred Heart(if you weren’t chased out by Father Blanchfield!).

Back then I-84 didn’t go through Waterbury and started at St Mary’s Hospital. The racer boys would enter the highway there and go out past Loehmann Chevrolet where there was a straight quarter-mile stretch… bridge to bridge. 84 had little traffic, so the races did not interfere. However, the cops knew the deal and were always on the lookout. With the volume of traffic on that road today it could never happen.

Waterbury was such a great place to grow up. With all the high schools near the center and all the schools letting out at the same time, you got to meet a lot of kids from other parts of town and other schools… Wilby, Crosby, Sacred Heart, Croft, Catholic High, even Notre Dame Academy and Kaynor Tech. What great memories!

Day +62 “As Time Goes By”

Another case of two steps forward, one step back. I was giddy over doing three laps last night… I was a little tired, but happy. The total mileage was a little over 1 ¼ miles. Also, I’ve been feeling good and looking forward to my doctor appointment tomorrow. So, today Becky and I went to PT (evaluation day)… she worked and I was evaluated. After that we stopped at the pharmacy and picked up a refill for one of the 22 or so drugs that I take. Then off to the BMT clinic for blood work… we were home by 11:00 AM.

Then the other shoe drops; the phone rang a 12:30… blood results were in and my white blood cells were critically low. It necessitated a change in meds, dropping one and restarting another AND, I had to go back to the hospital for a Neupagen shot. So, by the time we got back there, waited while they ran through patients during lunch hours (you can imagine how that was), we FINALLY got out of there by 2:30… UGH!

So the upside of the whole day was dinner. Sean came to relieve Becky (Ruth Ann had to be at school tomorrow and Becky couldn’t be out of the office four days in a row). Ruth Ann and I thought we and had another container of sauce and meatballs in the freezer, but when I thawed it, it was Bob Lombardo’s super-duper Putenesca sauce. What a treat! On Linguini… Heaven!

My cousin Rich, who lives in Eastham, on Cape Cod with his wife Judy, slipped me an e-mail today and brought back memories of another “Sunday Picnic” place… Rockwell Park in Bristol. It was a really nice place back then, and had a really nice picnic grove. But because it was a park in the middle of a city, the guys had to go at 6:00 AM to secure one of the huge, concrete picnic tables with benches. The guys would play setback until the rest of the family showed up. It’s a good thing they didn’t start drinking that early!!!

Day +60 "I Wished on a Moon"

So how stupid is this: Becky and I went out for a walk last night and I said I wanted to go a little farther than the night before. So we did the normal two and continued to the place where I got turned around the night before. I told Becky I wanted to go to the trash can up ahead. Becky, the runner, said ”Dad, that’s the halfway point, or really close.” I didn’t think so, and we turned around at the trash can and went back to the apartment. When Becky did the calculation, we found out I had done 1.19 Miles, or a smidge less than three laps (1.23 Miles)! What a dope! Next time I’ll listen to Becky.

Another thing that happened in the past few days is that I got a couple of interesting comments on the beach excursion episode. Bob, from Bonita Springs, commented that his extended family did the same thing, except on Monday’s. His Dad, his Dad’s friends, and just about all the barbers and tailors in Hartford had Mondays off (remember that!!). So they all went to Hamonassette on Mondays. Same array of food. Angela, late of Waterbury said her family did the same thing as up, but relayed that they had to leave for home at 3:30… bummer. BUT, they always stopped at a farm along the way and picked up some sweet corn. She did say that corn was the best. It’s sweet corn time in Florida now (and another harvest in November). Picked some up… can’t wait. Did I mention that growing up, Angela had the best collection of CURRENT 45’s of anyone I knew, except for maybe the family that lived next door on Granby Street. Rose, do you remember that!

The next comment I got was from Nancy in Old Saybrook. Nancy and I went to high school in Waterbury, way back when. She also being Italian had almost the same story, except she accused me of hogging the tables at the grove. Different grove… I knew Nancy then. One difference, her family would ALL go in the morning and had breakfast there with jelly donuts and fresh hard rolls with butter, the bread and pastries coming from either Ed’s Bakery or Stanley’s Bakery on Walnut Street. Oh, how I remember those bakeries. They cooked the macaroni at the grove… did the beach and (her comment) “after serious crisping and Noxzema” settled in for the nighttime barbeque.

Two cousins also piped in… Pinky, who lived next door, said she loved to come on those Sunday excursions. Leonora relayed much the same story as Nancy and me, except mentioned the Southington Rec… a place I had forgotten about until she mentioned it… and I lived in Southington to 22 years!