This is the Table Mascot we created at my cousin’s wedding, many years ago:
We did carry on the Table Mascot tradition at other weddings but I think this may be the only one captured on film.
Only my family…
If y’all wouldn’t mind, maybe you could fling some prayers over to my sister, Janet. She’s back in the hospital again. The initial problem was kidney stones but apparently they snowballed into a kidney infection. That nice little infection decided to go on a little trip because I guess it got tired of just hanging around in the kidney so off it went into her blood. They’re trying to pinpoint just what sort of bacteria they’re dealing with so that they can treat it with the most effective antibiotic. In the meantime, we wait.
Back in the day, I recall doctors talking to people face to face following surgery. Okay, I admit I haven’t waited around for people getting surgery all that often. Matter of fact, the only time I ever did was when my mom had 349 brain surgeries all within a 4 months span. Fine, it wasn’t quite that many but it sure seemed that way. The point is, afterwards, the doctor came out and spoke to us in person. That was my only experience with the surgical waiting experience.
This time around, when we left Theresa, they showed us where the waiting area was. We went to the desk and were given a pager. One of those pagers like you get when you go to a restaurant. It came with the same instructions. “The range of the pager is limited. Don’t go wandering off too far. Otherwise we’ll give your table to someone else.”
Now since we were there at the hospital for so many hours, we were hungry. There was a coffee shop just below the waiting area. We were told that’s within range. As we walked down, I wondered whether or not I should stand in the middle of the floor with my arm raised up sort of like an antenna. I decided it was more important to eat. Unfortunately, the hospital coffee shop didn’t have much in the way of decent food. Not unless you like stuff with mayonnaise - chicken salad, tuna salad, fake seafood salad… Ah, well. I would have been better off standing outside doing my imitation of an antenna.
Off we go, back up to the waiting area to wait. An hour later, the pager goes off and we go running to the desk. The receptionist points to a phone on the wall that’s ringing. It doesn’t sound like a regular phone ring. It sounds like something from a game show. I pick up the receiver and talk to the doctor. Naturally I didn’t think of any questions for him until after I hung up.
Then I walked downstairs to call my sister to let her know Theresa was fine. Everyone else seemed to have a perfectly good signal right there in the waiting room. Not me, though. For a company that spends so much money advertising about more bars, uh, I think they need to come look at my phone.
I walk in between 2 doors. Talking there didn’t work out too well. Every sound seemed amplified. I decided to stand outside, which was fine. Until I tried to get back inside. Who would have thought the doors would lock behind me? Lucky thing someone was passing and didn’t think I looked like an angel of mercy so he let me back in.
After my experience, I have a list of demands for the next time. Not that I want there to be a next time but hey, if there is one, this is what I want:
1. Pagers are fine to let people know surgery is over but if someone is cutting into my child, I want to see the doctor in person afterwards.
2. I want a couple of seconds to think of questions.
3. I want decent food. Damn, if you gotta be in the hospital for hours, have something edible!
4. Get something in there to boost my cellphone signal so I don’t get locked out of the building.
5. And while we’re at it, how about a TV in the waiting area. Or at least some newspapers & magazines.
Well there’s a nice little photo of them drawing on my princess’ ankle before surgery and another photo of her foot all wrapped up so it’s about as big as a watermelon. However, my phone apparently got into an argument with my computer and they’re not talking so I can’t transfer the photos.
Princess is fine, now that the pain drugs have kicked in. Apparently she takes after my sister and morphine doesn’t do squat for her. Damn, I remember them giving me that stuff after the c-section and it worked just fine. I recall trying to make a few phone calls to say Stephen was born and struggling to talk without slurring.
I have no idea why I am so tired when I spent most of the day sitting around and waiting. The surgery itself took an hour. Yet we were in the hospital for 6 hours. The surgery better have fixed the ankle problem because I don’t really want to repeat all that again.
Stephen has been in Rome for what? 49 weeks now? Fine. It’s only been 2 months but hey, that should have been plenty of time for him to install that webcam I gave him for my birthday… uh, I mean his birthday. That was his gift from me. He opened it and said something like, “Is this a gift for me or for you?”
Today he finally got around to installing it. I suspect the only reason he even did it was because I told him it can record video. That and so he could see the dog. When he calls and both Frank & I are home, I put it on speaker phone so we can all talk. If Old Dog is around and hears his voice, he gets excited and starts looking for Steve. My son thought that was funny and wanted to see it for himself.
Today we both finally got Skype up & running. For the first time in 8 weeks, I got to see my son. There was a bit of a glitch, though. He could hear me perfectly fine but I couldn’t hear him. I’m quite certain he would have much preferred the situation be reversed. But it was fun. I got to see him make faces at me. He got to see his pup. Then he went off to practice playing the organ while I fiddled with the settings to try and figure out why I couldn’t hear him.
A few hours later, I finally got it working and he came back online. We got to talk a bit rather than just me talking and him IMing me. Then this boy; this child I was in labor with for over 24 hours before they finally decided to do an emergency c-section; the son I slaved and sacrificed for (where’s that violin music?) had the nerve to say to me, “I’m not sure I really need to see you every time I talk to you.”
If, down the road, he finds he is not being called to the priesthood after all and instead, gets married, I am praying that he has at least 6 kids.
Today was supposed to be my brother, Mike’s 48th birthday. What’s funny is if he were alive, I wouldn’t have given his birthday much thought. People in my family are lucky if they get birthday cards from me. I usually claim to have given them an invisible one. No one bought that story so now I do send cards out, although they’re typically a month late.
When we were kids, Mike used to make up names for people. There was some older man in the neighborhood who used to wander around. Thinking back now, I suspect maybe he suffered from dementia but what do young kids know about that sort of thing? Mike used to refer to him as Machine Gun Mattalli. I have no idea where Michael came up with that name. My brother, did, however, improve with the naming as he got older.
His names for people progressed to foods. He would name people a food that he thought fit them and somehow, the names did seem to fit the people. The person named Cream Soda did have hair that was the color of cream soda. The guy he referred to as Clam Chowder had a rather milky complexion.
Mike ran into some problems in high school. I was 3 years older and was in with a different crowd. No, wait. I wasn’t in with any crowd. Anyhow, Mike used to come home with some funny stories. There was the time someone brought a radio to school. The person turned the volume up really loud and then put the radio inside a locker and locked it. In our school, the lockers weren’t in the hallways. They were in the back of the classroom. Another time, someone bought some white mice from the local pet store and let them loose in the classroom. We didn’t find out until years later, that the “someone” was Michael.
Ah, yes. We are seeing a pattern here. The entire family is nuts. I wonder if they do birthday cake up there. If they don’t, I think mom would have made sure things were a bit different today.
This past Sunday, at the 9:30 a.m. Mass, they had the Catechists Commissioning. A catechist is someone who teaches religious education. My daughter is one. She teaches 2nd grade, which is a big year - First Communion for the kids. Theresa has been doing this since high school (6 years) so we’re familiar with the drill.
Now I am not an early morning person. I’m generally up by 7:30 during the week & by 8 or 8:30 on the weekends, depending on how many times I hit the snooze button. It’s not like I’m not up early enough to make it to the earlier Mass. I just don’t like going. It means I can’t leisurely drink my coffee, nuking it a few times as it cools down. It means I can’t take my time in the shower. And don’t you dare suggest I skip either of those things before heading out. Trust me, you would not want to deal with a decaffeinated, unshowered Monkling first thing in the morning.
But being Mother of the Year, I made the sacrifice to get to the early Mass this Sunday. Theresa didn’t come home the night before so I sent her a text asking if she was going to meet us at Church. I didn’t get any reply so we just headed up there. As we were walking, we see Theresa driving past. I point her out to Frank & we wonder if we should just head into the Church or wait outside. We opt to go in. We stand in the vestibule, talking with friends, waiting for her. No Theresa. It’s getting late. Thinking maybe we missed her and she’s already sitting, we go into the Church and look around. We don’t see her anywhere so we sit down. I text her to ask where she is.
Mass starts. Frank is getting a bit worried. Me, not so much. I figure she’s around somewhere in the building or maybe on her way in, something came up. About 5 minutes into the Mass, I get a text from her (luckily I had it on silent) saying she had a meeting & that she wasn’t going to that Mass.
Now what I want to know is, who was in the exact same car we have, with a driver who, to both her parents, looked like Theresa? It seems there is a Theresa clone out there. Too bad she can’t track the clone down. She’s involved in so many things, having a clone would sure make life easier.
This afternoon, I went to get the mail. Nothing exciting. Some catalogs, some bills and mostly junk. Then there was the magazine put out by Theological College in Washington, D.C. where Steve lived for the past 3 years.
I put that aside rather than tossing it straight into the recycling bin, because sometimes there’s a photo of him in there. Actually the only photos were of his entire class each year. A tiny photo, him being one of many. Then I flipped it over and this was on the front:
Yes, that handsome, short guy in front, on the far right is my boy. (The scanned copy doesn’t look as good as the original. Plus I had to crop it to fit on the blog page. If you want to see the entire cover, which I think is a bit clearer, click on the photo. It’ll open in a new window and if you click on that photo, it’ll enlarge it to full size.)
I only have one copy of the magazine so no one is getting this.
* Editing* to say that back in April, I had posted about him telling me he had stared down the pope. This was the moment he was referring to.
Many nights I sit here staring at the screen with no idea what I’m going to blog about. Other times, like tonight, I have way too many things to write about. I’m saving most for another time (including the award I got from Nancie) & will stick to just 1 story that is relevant to something happening tomorrow.
If you’ve been reading my blog for any length of time, you know my sister, Janet, has had oh, just a few stays in the hospital & some surgery. (If you’re really bored, you can catch up with December of last year.) Let’s just say I lost count of how many & this has been ongoing since she was 12. So pretty much all her life she’s been having so much fun with all this.
Tomorrow is yet another surgery, to reconstruct the right ureter. Ya see, when you have tons of kidney stones forcing their way through that little, itty bitty tube, they can tend to tear the crap out of said tube aka ureter. Thus the surgery.
Now, quite naturally, Janet’s been getting just a bit discouraged with all this. She wants to be healed. In our family, we joke about her and call her St. Janet of ____ (the town she lives in) but the truth is, if anyone is deserving of a miracle, it’s her. That’s not the point of this post, though. Getting back to her being discouraged, she’s been praying to Pope John Paul II, a man who we’re pretty damn sure will be canonized. Actually the entire family is supposed to be praying to him for her. Don’t tell her but sometimes I forget.
A few weeks ago, she was having a little conversation with God saying she needs some sort of sign. He needs to give her some hope that her entire life isn’t going to be like this; that things are going to get better. Now, my sister doesn’t just ask God for a sign. Nope, she then has the nerve to tell Him what the sign should be! Pope John Paul often said, “Be Not Afraid” and that is what Janet said she wanted to see. Not only did she want to see it someplace, she wanted it to smack her in the face.
The following day (or was it later that same day?), she gets a magazine in the mail called Envoy. On the outside, there’s a paper wrapper and the first thing she sees on it is, “Be Not Afraid.” Now how weird is that? But it gets better. She opens it to the front cover and they have a list of some of the feature articles that are inside so again she sees, “Be Not Afraid” and underneath that is another line, “This means you.” Oh, and wait. It gets even better. The article is by a priest friend of hers. She had no idea it was going to be in there, much less what the title of the article would be.
In yet another odd coincidence, she also decided to pray to Our Lady of Czestochowa because Pope John Paul had a particular devotion to her. Guess when her feast day is? Yep, tomorrow, the day Janet’s having surgery.
If any of you pray, Janet could use a few prayers. For those of you that are Catholic, well you know exactly who to ask for favors now - Pope John Paul & Our Lady of Czestochowa. By the way, my sister is a damn showoff. She knows how to pronounce that.
For those of you who are not Catholic and find all the devotions to saints & the Blessed Mother as strange, let me leave you with this analogy. We don’t worship saints & the Blessed Mother. It’s more like - say I worked in Madison Square Garden and I had access to all the big name stars who perform there and you wanted an autograph. Now wouldn’t you ask me to get one for you because you know I’m right there?
Back tomorrow with:
1. A Janet surgery report
2. The blog award I got
3. How I got my job as a parkie
Today Theresa and I went out to the bookstore. Normally I’m not a big fan of shopping but I do love bookstores. Today I was on a mission. I wanted Italian flash cards. This required going to a few different stores before I found them. At first, I only saw French ones. “What? How can they only have them in French? That’s discrimination!” Then I got the brilliant idea to look on the other side of the bookshelf.
Once we got home, I went through the cards & started pulling cards out & taping them everywhere. When Theresa walked into the kitchen, she said something like, “Gee, why don’t you just hit me in the face with flashcards?”
Frank, however, is another story. He just got home from work & is in the kitchen eating dinner. So far, no word about the flashcards. I’m guessing he didn’t notice them. Here, let’s see… “Honey, did you notice anything in the kitchen?”
Pause. Long pause. “Cake?”
I just walked in there. “Huh?” He pointed to an empty silicone bundt thingie. “No, that’s not a cake.” He then got annoyed with me so I came back here to type some more. I guess it could look like a cake.
A few minutes passed and he came in here. “Do you mean the notes?”
“Yes.”
“But they’ve been up for the past couple of days.”
“No, I had exactly 3 post-it notes with words. These are flash cards. There are way more of them.”
Everywhere you look, there are flash cards:
I plan on labeling everything in the house. Of course labeling the food gets tricky. If I use up a flashcard for the container of milk what happens when we use it? If I write on an apple with marker, can it still be eaten? How about eggs? Do you think the dog will let me put a sticker on him? And yes, I really did write the word ‘le forbici’ on my scissors.
How else do we kow God's rescue unless we have been drowning? Can healing be demonstrated without injury, or love be proven without trial?
(re: being a parent) You may plant seeds and tend vines, but you are never the master of another's soul. It is the problem of freedom, again.
