Where Pooh talks about love, loss, hope....and family
I have been away a while. Not because I had nothing to say, but because there has too much going on and no time to sort it all out much less write about it.
My older brother Rick had a brain aneurysm. He has been in a coma and has been fighting for his life the last week. On three separate occasions he coded and we were told not to expect him to make it through the day. He has a wife and four little boys.
My family's world has been submerged in a week of tears, grief, fear, no sleep, and a mind numbing waiting punctuated by frightful medical updates that never seem to offer much hope. We have spoken to Brain Surgeons, Pulmonologist's, Internal Medicine Docs, Stroke Specialists, Phlebotomist's, Neurologist's...you name it. It seems that when it comes to brain injuries, the whole body can become involved pretty quick....and not in a good way.
Mostly what they said was,"His condition is grave and we are unclear as to everything that is going on, except to say this; Probably since birth, he has had a congenital defect in a vein in his brain and it has ruptured. This has caused his body to shut down and we are trying everything we know to keep him alive to allow his body and brain time to try to heal."
He had been unconscious the whole time.
So much for the lost part...Now for the found.
He woke up
Wed night, Thur morning at 1 AM when the nurse was changing an IV bag, he turned to her and asked.."Hey, what's going on?" She asked him if he knew who and where he was.... he answered, haltingly but correctly. She then told us later that she said to him "I'll be right back. I have to call about 40 doctors and your family"
.... A little over 24 hours later he is doing remarkably amazingly, astonishingly well.
The neuro ICU nurses rewrote his name on the chalkboard in his room from Rick to Rip (as in Van Winkle), as his wake-up and turnaround seems THAT dramatic. It does not seem humanly possible that this is the same gravely ill guy of 2 days ago.
We are all just shaking our heads. As of now he seems to be improving by the hour. He is talking, haltingly, and he is able to wiggle the fingers on a right hand that an hour earlier was completely paralyzed.
We know he is not out of the woods by any measure. And although he is looking at a ton of therapy and treatment, the most important thing is he is aware of who he is and he seems to be "him".
My family feels like we have won the lottery.
I am so exhausted... and so I am going to sleep.
I have so many things in my head to write about over the next few days and weeks, but I have two things I want to say before I finish this entry.
They are things I have been thinking about a lot these last few days.
The first thing is I have never loved my family more than I do right now this moment.
We are opinionated and independent people that often disagree and argue. We can and do drive each other crazy. But we never ever forget the most important thing, and that is that we are a family first.
As for the second thing?????
Call, or better yet, go see the people in your life that you love and TELL them you love them.
Don't put it off.
Think of all the things you would say to them if you knew they were going to be gone from you in ten minutes...forever...then say them.
Life is too tenuous to treat the people we love as though we will always have them around.
......we won't..............
In a second, they can be gone.
Just what we need.....John Ass-croft with ALL the information.....
In which Pooh goes to the movies and meets Gene Siskel and Luke Skywalker's cousin Neo.(He doesn't use the force, he uses the source..code)
The pickle posse was off to see the new Matrix movie last night. I seriously cannot remember the last time I saw that many uber-geeks and nerds in one place at one time.
In a word..it was AWESOME!!! (Although, I was a bit surprised not to see at least some of the extra hard core dressed up like a NEO or Mr Smith, or oh please, please a Trinity in leather and vinyl.)
This showing was sponsored in part by a couple of local comic book stores. Bill, who is a comic book junkie, secured our tickies...WooWoo thanks Bill. Standing in line prior to being let into the theater, the conversations were about The Hulk, Star Wars, the latest hand held Sony gaming toy, Enterprise, The Xmen, recording laughter to a Clie, Jaws...........Oh yeah, we were geeks, and loving it..big time.
The thing is....if you are going to go see a movie like this, the absolute best crowd to see it with, is one filled with people like this.
On to the movie.. (Don't worry, no spoilers for those who have not seen it and want to be surprised)
Visually this thing is as stunning and "Wham Bam" as you can imagine. I thought the story was a bit lacking, but honestly when you are doing a trilogy I think the middle story always has a built in weakness. Middle movies are by design, a bridge. They don't get the freshness of the new story and they also don't get the final climax of the last movie..They do have to do the unglamorous work of carrying you from one end of the story to the other, and this movie does that.
I do take issue with the Soul Train meets Dance Dance Revolution scene. Besides the fact that 145 minutes is just too damn long for a single scene in a movie where all that happens is that everyone seems to be doing the latest Richard Simmons workout video in sepia, it was intercut with a totally stupid, not hot sex scene.
That said, there were fight scenes that had the crowd Wuffing and Uh-ing they were so visceral. Add a killer car/motorcycle WWF ballet, and some amazing special effects...and you have a monster at the box office.
Also I was more than amazed by the humor in the film. There were a bunch (and I mean a bunch) of lines that made the audience laugh out loud. Kudos to the Wachowski brothers for not taking themselves too seriously.
Wrap that all up in 25 year old movie theater who's air conditioning wasn't working too well, and you have 500 sweaty geeks reliving their matinee wonder years with joy and gusto.
Bottom line..will I go see it again??? Duh..probably this weekend.
In which Pooh marvels at what some people will or won't eat.
I have just gotten off the phone with my attorney and so it is official. I Jack, being of sound mind and body, do hereby leave all of my pickles to Bill.
I love you man....
In which Pooh tries to figure out where the liars are in this monte game.
I have been seeing this going around on a bunch of blogs and it looks like fun.
I am going to describe some events that may or may not have happened to me. Guess which one (or ones), I am lying my butt off about.
1) I have been a soloist with a major symphony orchestra.
2) I have talked to 2 Miss America's when they were naked.
3) I had Canadian Mounties threaten to kill me.
4) I was hired as a political consultant by Vice President Hubert Humphrey.
5) I made Katherine Hepburn laugh till she cried.
6) I was chased through an airport by someone with a machine gun.
7) I have a Top Secret government security clearance.
Let the games begin!!!!!
In which Pooh discovers what Alex Haley already knows. There is just no explaining some elements of your family tree.
Mopsa, blogged a story called "The Invalid" about a family Easter dinner on 4/25/03. I loved this post. I was still chuckling when I thought about it this weekend.
We ALL have them...family skeletons, I mean.
I am talking about those unbelievably boorish, demented, clueless, knuckle dragging ding-dongs that somehow jacked into your family genetic code when you weren't looking.
Now if the connection is a close one, genetically speaking, (say a sister or parent), we can claim that Darwin forgot to mention that SOMETIMES, trailer trash or a chunk of Twinkie can get into the DNA when it is cooking and can cause negative aberrations in the outcome.
If the connection is many genetic permutations away from you, it is ok to claim that some super bad DNA was inadvertently allowed into the family primordial stew by accidental overexposure to alcohol.
Yes indeedy, no matter how you cut it, we all have stories we can tell on our families and ourselves.
This story involves a Thanksgiving party that my mother threw a couple years ago.
By way of full disclosure, it is imperative for me to say this right up front.....................My immediate family is completely insane!
Always has been. Happily so, I might add. Growing up at my house was like "Our Gang" meets the "Marx Bothers". Add "The Addams Family" minus the ghoulish stuff and then send everybody to the "Fame" school. That will get you a fair description of life at our house growing up.
My Mom was/is the ringleader.
A few years ago, she thought it would be fun to do a little genealogy research on our family. She found she was not only enjoying the research but she turned up a ton of stuff we never knew and it was a fascinating experience. In the course of this search, my mom discovered that we had family cousins we didn't know we had. It turns out that they lived in of all places, Duluth Minnesota. (For those of you reading this from say- Glascow, this is a port city north of Minneapolis about 150 miles.) But I digress, mom dropped her cousin a letter of intro and just to say hi and to ask a couple of questions about our shared genealogy. She got a nice response and in time they were e-mailing back and forth every few weeks or so for about 6 months. My mom, (Faye) thought it would be fun to invite her newfound cousin (Betty) and her family down for Thanksgiving dinner.
A word about holiday dinners at my house growing up.
My mom ALWAYS cooked...She ALWAYS has 4 times more food than needed. She is a great cook.... Between my brothers and sisters and all their kids and everyone else, the number of immediate family at these events is 23 if all show. I cannot remember a Holiday meal with less than 35 people in my life, and many times we had over 50......For every major holiday since I can remember.
My mom always encouraged us to invite anyone that, as she put it, "needs a family at the holidays".
(I am biased I know, but I think my mom rocks.)
You need this background for the story.
My mom invited Betty and her husband Bob, 2 of their grown kids, Lisa and John (early 30's), and their spouses and 5 kids..... 11 total. Their kids ranged in age from 3 to 8. We have 12 kids in our clan, ages 1 to 9.
Mom thought that with all the kids it would be fun to do a costumed Thanksgiving. So she called Betty and asked her if that would be ok, or would they rather just come without the costumes. Betty said "Sounds like a wonderful idea lets all do it in full costume". Mom says great, and then purposely said, we have a rather odd family when it comes to stuff like this so be prepared for costumes that are a bit out there..... they will not be typical...is that ok with you?
"Not typical?? Ooooh that sounds very arty, we can hardly wait." says Betty...
We start to plan and soon the day arrived.
Now if you are squeamish you should turn away now, as from here on it gets just plain family ugly.
The doorbell rings and I open the door to greet them. Here they are all prim and proper wearing nothing that looks like Pilgrim clothes save one cross tie and a shawl. Well...ok so they didn't want to come dressed up. That's ok.... "Come on in and welcome to the Family Thanksgiving feast" I say.
Remember my description of my family? ...This is not a store bought costume kind of family. We tend to be ....ahem...a wee-bit creative when it comes to this stuff. I had a sense when I opened the door and saw their reaction to my costume that we may be in for a long day.
My Costume:
I had paper mache'd a huge craggy mass around my body and head. I then painted it gray and hot glued moss and other stuff to the outside. I then imprinted the legend "1492" on my side...
They stood in the door staring... not moving at all..I pointed to the number on my side and said, "See look 1492, I'm Plymouth Rock!"
I think the look in their eyes could best be described as fear....
It was mostly like a Rod Serling episode of Twilight Zone after that.
We always encourage our "kids" to stretch their imaginations when doing anything creative and that almost nothing is off limits.
This is the way we grew up, submerged in the most wonderful stimulating environment and we believe in spurring the little ones to explore all ideas.
Now if mom is the ringleader, I am clearly the "out of the box guy". I have a bit of a reputation ...ahem....amongst my nieces and nephews as being the go-to- guy when it comes to lending help in putting stuff like this together.
(It seems there are ridiculous rumours floating amongst my nieces and nephews about me doing completely insane things to get laughs on stage. Somehow, they seem to have the crazy notion I may have some "boundry issues" when it comes to not knowing when to say when for a joke. They feel they can use for their own purpose. )
Anyway, there were lots of calls and meetings to cement down their thoughts, and they came up with some terrific costumes. Some of the highlights.....
2 of my sister Jill's boys came as maize (Jill’s a vegetarian, and the 2 boys thought it would be good to promote a veggie Thanksgiving) They glued about 5000 popcorn kernels to their upper bodies and then they glued down enough corn husks to cover their pants. The other boy of Jill's, Nick, wanted to show how cruel it was to the deer and turkey so, with a little of my help, he came as a head shot deer...(It looked so gruesome that he resurrected it for Halloween the next year). Jill came as a Salem Witch. My favorite niece Sabrina, 9, went whole hog. She spent 2 months working on her Pocahontas costume. It was all leather and beading that she did mostly herself and it was beautiful and she wrote and recited a wonderful little (historically accurate) story. My sister Carrie came dressed as a rifle, My dad, in full headdress was Indian Chief in charge of all firewater. My mom came as the great, great, great, something granddaughter of Captain John Smith, leader of Jamestown Colony. (Which in fact she is).
3 of my brother Rick’s boys wanted to be Indians. Not the lame-o F-troop kind either. So they ended up with a burlap front flap tied at the waist...that's right front flap. They went with the thong between the cheeks leaving the backside exposed. I bought like 60 bucks worth of dark cover makeup and applied it all over their bodies to give them that skin burnished look...add some war paint and feathers and I mean to tell you, they looked great!
Now everybody in MY family thought the bare assed thing was a scream and funny, but the response from out guests was, well, less than ideal.
One of the mom's (Lisa, Betty's daughter) actually started crying. "Oh!Oh! how could you... how could you. That’s obscene."
I said, "Hey the boys are 2, 6 and 6 and I tied the flap down so it wouldn't go anywhere, but if it upsets you, I'm sorry we can put some pants on them don't worry"
Lisa wouldn't shut up about how strange and weird we all were. For the next half-hour until we ate, their entire family sat in the living room looking like our germs were crawling up their legs. I sat and tried to make conversation but nobody spoke more that a yes or no.
All our kids kept inviting all their kids to the basement to play video games and watch Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.... nobody moved.....FINALLY the dinner bell rang and we started eating. We hadn't even started serving when the problem mom, Lisa started whispering loudly to Betty(her mom) "what a terrible thing to do to those little boys"...
That was when my mom got a little steamed...She said something like "First of all, nobody DID it to them. They thought up those costumes, by themselves, by themselves. They asked me if they were ok and I said I thought they were wonderful and clever as well. So, blame me if you think someone needs blaming. Second, nobody else seemed to have a problem with it, but you were uncomfortable so we had them put on some pants .......How about we call it over and done with and lets finish dinner............
then.......BOOM!!!!!!!!
Betty stood up and said.. "WELL I NEVER IN MY LIFE, BLAH, INSULT MY DAUGHTER, BLAH, ETC".... then Lisa's husband stood up and said he was repulsed at the thought of it all and couldn't eat....Lisa stood up and and started crying again....BEDLAM!!!! Then without saying 10 more words, the whole family just got up and left the house and drove off....
We sat there, at the 4 dinner tables for like 60 seconds in dead silence trying to figure out what had just happened. Then, as if cued, Dusty 5 says real loud......
I guess we scared them off, huh Grandma?...
We laughed until our sides hurt about it...
The sad thing is that my mom sent a couple of e-mails to try to smooth things over, but we never ever heard from them again...oh well
Like I said, every family has one..
I know there are those out there that would say that WE are the whack-jobs that everyone thinks has screws loose...It's ok though, I prefer it to being screwed down so tight you can't live.
In which Pooh has one too many jars of honey and gets mushy
I have not yet had the privilege to meet her, but I am loving mopsa these days
For some strange reason, (for which I have no good explanation) I find myself resonating with some of her posts in a such a visceral way that I end up blogging my butt off about what I find harmonic in what she's talking about.
It's not like I have trouble coming up with subjects of my own. It's not like I am stalking her or her blog.
(I bet she's glad to read that part)
It's not anything I can pinpoint. Except... she continuously keeps touching on things I find interesting. And, her writing is personable and touching and funny and gets me to thinking. And that thinking gets me to writing.
And for that I send you a heartfelt thanks mopsa.
While we are on the subject, I want to say a bit about some of my other blogging buds. I have only been "doin the blog thang" for 4 months as of today and I am so hooked it isn't funny. I started by going nuts and collecting bookmarks for about 1300 sites, (really). I thought they were worth looking at and keeping track of. I quickly figured out that if I looked in on each of them for 10 minutes 3 times a week, I would need 93 hours a week to do them all...uhhhhh THAT wasn't going to work very well...... I would have less of a life than I do now if I tried to keep track of them all.
So I started whittling...1050... And then hacking...975.... and slashing. After a couple of days, I got the number down to............ 800...(this is not going to work)...I finally decided that I needed to pare it down to only those places I really loved going to, places that moved me, or uniquely inspired me somehow. Using those criteria I have reduced my "must reads" to about a dozen places.
Some of these "must reads" are owned and written by people I considered friends before I started blogging. Some became friends after I started. Some I still don't know "in person", but I feel like I know them.
In fact, the reason I HAVE a blog is because my friend Jeremy set this one up for me.
His place is a mix of Geekville meets Spielberg meets Warhol and he is a great guy.
Irish-girl is someone I met through blogging. Her place is eclectic and warm and her poetry is amazing. She also turned me on to Poetry Slams...Although; in return I turned her on to Jeremy.... (Well, sort of...He and I went to a poetry slam together and he met her then.)
Bill, who's friendship means the world to me. His blog is a continuous source of music, media, humor, irreverence and a good veggie menu.
I marvel really, at how good these sites are. They range from geeky to loving, soul filled to political and everything in between. It is an amazing slice of passion, talent and life.
I started writing in a blog to get back in the habit of writing again, something I had stopped doing completely a few years ago after my divorce.
Well, I am writing again, and I am thrilled. But, as in most things in life, what you think you are going to get out of doing something, is rarely what you get. In my case, I wanted to get my writing back. What I got was far better and more important. I found new friends and by becoming more intimately acquinted with the friends I have, I have gained a much higher appreciation for how wonderful they truly are.
Well, this post has become a bit long winded. (Yeah, Yeah I know, which post of mine doesn't?) So I will sign off for now. I will return with the 2 stories inspired by recent mopsa posts, before the weekend is over.
Goodnight my friends.