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!