I Am A Butterfly

There’s a guy on a message board I read. He has advanced prostate cancer, and is on his second or third bout with the disease. It just keeps coming back.

And this time, it’s not only come back, but it’s spreading, and it sounds very much like this guy is going to die. He has kids, including a new baby who was born a few weeks early. He started his current round of chemo and radiation while she was still in the NICU.

I don’t know this guy well at all, but it breaks my heart. My heart aches for his wife, and especially for his kids, who will miss out on so much with a loving father. It’s a tragedy. An honest to god tragedy. One that’s played out every single day all over the world.

Sometimes, I’m absolutely astounded that there is yet to be a cure for this disease. With everything that’s possible in our modern world, how can it be that cancer keeps on going?

Every year around this time, my regular UPS guy acquires a boy. I’m not sure from whence said boy comes, but he’s usually around 16 years old and appears as if by magic some time in early December. Once the boy arrives, that means the holiday package delivering season is in full swing. It also means that my regular UPS guy gets to sit in the truck while his boy does all the work. My regular UPS guy’s mama didn’t raise no fool.

Yesterday morning, the UPS boy trudged through the sleet to my door with no fewer than five packages, ranging in size from small to quite large. Two of them were things I ordered for Christmas gifts. The rest were gifts for Scott and me from my mother-in-law.

Some of you may remember that last year, she gave Scott a towel for Christmas. One. Towel.* I got an amaryllis and counted myself lucky.**

This year, Scott’s mother decided to bury us in baked goods. English muffins, to be precise. Two of today’s packages were from Wolferman’s.*** We received both the Christmas Bloom Tower and the Merry and Bright Presents gift box. That comes to a grand total of seven bags of English muffins, along with some jam, crumpets, cocoa, and tea breads.

I don’t think I need to buy baked goods for 6 months.

I’m not complaining. I like English muffins, and they freeze well. It just makes me giggle, is all, to see all those many bags of English muffins lined up on the counter.

*Don’t get me wrong, the yearly Mom Bonus Check and B&N gift cards are really the true gifts, but the side stuff is always a little wacky.

**That was a lovely gift which I tried to regrow this season, but my Black Thumb of Death^TM kicked in and that bulb was having none of it. I gave in and tossed it a few days ago.

***Incidentally, if you’ve never had a Wolferman’s English muffin, I really to recommend them. They’re delicious. Pop in for coffee some time and I’ll toast one up for you. I may have spares.

Alex just said that to me in a text message. I think that will be my new motto.

…it will be a miracle. He managed to rip both the left and right pockets on his new pants today, and the seams below the pockets. In his defense, he’s never done this before, so it must be something about the pants.

On another note, why is it always assumed that a woman will know how to sew something like that up? Or how to sew on a button? These pants will be going to the tailor, thank you very much.

Someone on a message board I read posed the quesion: “with whom do you share a birthday?” I replied with the following, which I don’t think I’ve ever posted here. That’s sad, because I think it’s a funny story.

JFK Jr. shared my birthday. My mother always thought that was a good reason for me to marry him. When I was in my early 20’s, she used to encourage me to go out in NYC to clubs where John-John was known to hang out, so I could meet him and we could laugh about how we shared a birthday and he would fall in love with me and we’d get married.

The day his plane crashed, she called me and said, in all seriousness, as if I ever had a chance with JFK Jr., “I’m SO glad you didn’t marry him!”

My mother and her husband hired a 3-piece band for their wedding party a couple of weekends ago. It was a bass player, a guitar player, and a female vocalist. They were quite good, and did a nice job setting the tone for the evening with mainly light jazz.

What no one realized, however, was that the guitar player was getting quietly sloshed as the evening went on. When the party ended and it was time for the band to pack up and go, the vocalist and the bass player packed up their own gear and left. It was at this point that we realized that the guitar player was bombed out of his gourd. He was stumbling around, babbling fairly incoherently, and trying to get another drink.

It was clear that there was no way he was leaving on his own, because no one was going to let him get behind the wheel of a car. So it was decided that a cab would be called for him. This proved to be a daunting task, because the only cab company in town is owned by my step-father - aka my mother’s ex-husband and Alex’s father - but that’s another story entirely. Suffice to say that the late night person couldn’t be reached, and a cab became not an option.

While everyone is talking about what to do about this guy, the guy himself is still wandering around looking for more booze. That was when Alex sprang into action and appointed himself the guy’s babysitter. It was then that the guy started making claims about having been the guitar player for Quiet Riot, among other claims I can’t recall. At one point, he was starting to get belligerant, and Alex was trying to contain him. That was when he said, in a trying-to-be-threatening tone, “You think you could handle Quiet Riot?”

And that was when I lost it and started laughing at him. Until then, I felt bad and embarrassed for him that he allowed to get himself into this position, but this absurdity was hysterical. I turned to him and asked, “Why? Are you going to call him and get them over here?” His response was to blink owlishly at me, mouth agape.

Eventually, Denny, being the mensch he is, decided to just put the guy up in a hotel for the night. One of Denny’s friends drove Mr. Quiet Riot over there. As of 3pm the next day, he still hadn’t come back for his gear. Eventually, several days later, the bass player came back to pick it up and gave back a third of the band’s fee.

And the reason I’m telling you about this now is that I keep thinking about this story over and over every time I see an article about the death of Kevin DuBrow. As you can imagine, I’m not much of a Quiet Riot fan, but I do feel sympathy when someone dies. In this case, though, the sympathy is overshadowed by remembering this crazy guitar player guy.

My mother married her long time boyfriend on October 12. (I say “a new addition,” but that’s not entirely accurate. Denny’s been a real part of the family for years now, it’s just that now it’s legal.) They eloped to Barbados and were wed in a small, private ceremony. So when they got back, they had a party to celebrate.

The party was last weekend, on the 17th, so Scott and I had a whirlwind trip to Georgia for the party. We arrived early Saturday afternoon and left Sunday afternoon. Even though it was short, it turned out to be our best visit ever.

My mother is blissfully happy. Denny, her husband, is a wonderful man and it’s obvious that they’re very much in love. The party was huge fun, and I finally got to meet Denny’s friends and family. There were also members of my own family there I haven’t seen in a while, so that was another great thing.

It was really a wonderful weekend, full of celebration.