This past week tore through our lives like a Tasmanian Devil. My son and I had birthdays last week. The weekend before that a ton of my high school and college friends showed up for a surprise party. That was AWESOME!
From left: Bruce, Johnny, Lizzie, Marco on top of Nick, Jeff, Michele, Rob, John, Jeannie, Tom holding Lia, Dave, Kathleen, Anne, Martin, Francis, and Steve.
On my birthday, October 1, I turned 40. Yippee! I went to work and came home to the smell of Chinese-made Mexican food. There is this awesome burrito place run by a Chinese family near my house. Their shrimp burrito is simply fabulous. After dinner, I took Serafina to see mt ailing grandma, my last living grandparent. She has 28 great-grandkids!When she saw me and had the opportunity to say Happy Birthday to me, in person, well, I’ll never forget the look on her face.
My son Marco, who’s birthday is the next day, came home from school sick. We kept him out of school on Friday (his Birthday) and Lisa and I pushed his party back one day in hopes he’d recover. His party was going to be our annual “polar bear” event. We crank up the pool to 95 degrees and watch the steam rise off the pool and the kids. It was rainy/icky on Saturday and Sunday was supposed to be beautiful. Sunday was, but Marco was still sick. We had to cancel his party. He was crying all morning but then forgot and moved on with the day. That afternoon, my family showed up for the party anyway and we sung happy Birthday and fed a cake made for 30 people, to 10.
Rewind one day. A bunch of my local friends and family gathered at one of the best Belgian restaurants in the area, Waterzooi. Dinner and beer were fantastic. While others at my table were ordering Blue Moon glass by glass, my friend Greg and I were ordering 24-Oz bottles of Affligem, one of our favorites. My brother Tom had four Delerium Nocturnum, a really good Belgian triple-fermented beer. Needless to say, I was not in the condition to drive home. Two of my friends came back to my house afterward and we drank more beer and did a few shots of Petrón. We passed the time talking about Football (and some other stuff) as we went around the table with my iPhone, each of us voting on songs to be played over my outdoor stereo system. This was made possible by an Apple Airport Express and the “Remote” app for the iPhone. This was our playlist:
Blue Bayou – Linda Ronstadt
Superstar – The Carpenters
Cruel to Be Kind – Nick Lowe
Over the Rainbow – Del Beazley
The Wonder of You – Elvis Presley
Thunder Road – Bruce Springsteen
Atlantic City – Bruce Springsteen
Insensitive – Jann Arden
Come Go with Me – The Del-Vikings
Behind Closed Doors – Charlie Rich
My Eyes Adored You – Barry Manilow
Truckin’ – Grateful Dead
Annie’s Song – John Denver
Baby Grand – Billy Joel
Home Town – Joe Jackson
No One Is To Blame – Howard Jones
Hallelujah – Jeff Buckley
Folks, that is hands down my favorite way to spend time with friends.
Fast forward to today, where Lisa was near-death. Barely able to breathe and completely not able to function. I took off work and too care of the kids, made doctor appointments, and basically did the things m y wife does every day. Man, I’ll never understand how she can do all that day in and day out! About mid-day, I realized that I was essentially sick too. I started drinking plenty of water, took some vitamins, took a 20-minute cat-nap between chores, and started gurgling some of Lisa’s prescription-grade cough medicine. Some kind of red shit that made me hallucinate when I was a kid. Now I drank extra to see if that still worked. Nothing so far, damn. So far Giovanni, Antonio, and Serafina are ok. We’ll see.
What bums me out is I have this trip to Vegas with some buddies from work next weekend. I hope I recover by then and the family is more or less healthy. If I don’t go now, I may postpone the trip and join my brother Johnny on his annual January trip to the City of Sin.
I hope everyone is healthy, happy, and has some good beer nearby. If you want any of the pictures from all of this, please shoot me an e-mail.
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