I met with the PA at MD Anderson this morning after getting some more blood work done; I think I’ve given about a quart already this week! Everything is up-to-snuff so far; there was one more test that was going to take a while. All of that info will be transmitted to Moffitt… appointment there on Monday morning; ROAD TRIP!!!
I have been exercising… either the treadmill or the Bowflex. I can do 30 minutes on the treadmill or about 30 minutes on the Bowflex. Ruth Ann and I have been able to coordinate their usage without any marital distress (thank goodness we each have a computer… otherwise we’d be at each other’s throats!). Above all, my walking is better and I feel good. Ruth Ann’s Uncle Carl called today and couldn’t believe how good I sounded on the phone.
When I was thinking of the road trip, I thought of a trip Ruth Ann and I took many years ago… just us and my roommate from college, Dave C., or as he was affectionately known, The Shooter. Now here was one of your truly unforgettable characters! I met Shooter at the Waterbury Branch of UConn in my freshman year. He was about 100 pounds, soakn’ wet, with a quick wit and a great laugh. We met again when I was assigned to a bed in his fraternity, Alpha Sigma Phi. We ended up being roommates and got to be pretty good friends, and fraternity brothers. Viet Nam was raging and the draft was in full swing. Shooter got a notice to go for a draft physical and went on a diet… they kicked him out of the exam center and told him to come back when he put on some weight. Fat chance of that happening.
So here’s the road trip: his folks had a boat on the Mystic River and he asked if we would like to spend a Sunday afternoon cruising Long Island Sound. So off we went in the Baby Blue Whale (Shooter’s ’59 Oldsmobile…the front and rear bumpers were in different zip codes!) on to Mystic. The boat was a 15 foot fishing boat with about a 20 HP motor… not the 42 foot Hatteras we had expected (“Gin and bitters, Sir?), but a boat none-the-less.
We cruised the Mystic River for a bit and ended in some estuary on the Thames River where it got awfully shallow. The motor was useless in shallow water and although the boat had oarlocks, it had only one oar. So Shooter decided that he being the host, would get into the water and drag the boat along until we got to deeper water. See if you can visualize this picture: here’s the 100 lb. Shooter, cigarette between his lips, the useless oar in his right hand as a staff, and the tow rope slung over his left shoulder, wading through this murky water and towing us to safety. To add insult to injury, a seagull flew by and deposited a “load” in the exact center of his T-Shirt. If we were moving any faster, he would have gotten a face-full! I almost fell out of the boat, I was laughing so hard.
We lost touch after we left UConn; me to the military, him to California to seek his fortune. He never moved back to Connecticut as so many East-to-West migrators did, but worked in Sacramento. We briefly connected again in 1998 and in early 1999, I got an email from his roommate… Shooter had died from pneumonia… he was only 43. Tommy Williams and I went to his memorial service at Saint Anthony’s church in Prospect and then went out to quaff a few beers to celebrate his life. We lifted our glasses to a great guy and remembered the good times at Alpha Sig: “To The F*#king Shooter!!!”
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