Thursday Thirteen

Back in 2011, I participated in Thursday 13, where people post a list of 13 things ... anythings that they could think of.  I did 100 Thursday 13s and the topics were as diverse as:

*Movie quotes
*Guilty Food Pleasures
*Things I remember about China
*Ways to cook "something with chicken in it"
*Favorite Flowers

etc., etc., etc.

Anita of Blue Country Magic has been, as of last week has written 548 lists, the most recent of which was "Things I fear."

It's kind of a fun thing to do, and stretches the brain some weeks.

Since today is 1 day before the 19th anniversary of Paul's death, I thought I would list 13 things about Paul (next month, the 22nd anniversary of David's, I'll do a list about David). Paul was a complicated person and I'm trying to add only the good things (or, in one case, the funny ones).

1.  Paul was the first birth that was induced.  The delivery was easy, but the recovery room was full, so I was left on a gurney in the hall.  I started bleeding heavily and had no way to call a nurse.  They finally found me and got the bleeding stopped, but I had lost so much blood, I fainted twice, first (and last) time I've ever fainted.  Walt knew something must be wrong because it was nearly noon before I called him because I couldn't even think about the long walk down to the pay phone!

2. Before he was born, Paul was very quiet during the day, and most active at night.  As a baby the pattern continued, which was terrible for someone with two toddlers who were active during the day and wanted to sleep at night.  I cannot think of the number of nights I had Paul in a backpack, walking around and around the dining room table, me crying, and him wide awake and so happy to have all this activity.  Was it any surprise that he became a performer, who was most active at night and slept during the day?

3. Seymour was our family dog but toward the end of her life, all the other kids had left home and she became primarily Paul's dog. They had a wonderful bond and it was Paul who had to make the decision to put her down, when she suffered from cancer.  He wanted to go to the vet alone.  I cry thinking about it.

4. Paul hated mayonnaise with a passion, so it was hilarious when he and Ned were making a movie that included a scene of Paul taking a huge spoonful of mayonnaise.

5. Paul once bought me a cheap smiley face necklace for Mother's Day or my birthday or something.  Smiley faces became a joke between us and we exchanged smiley face gifts for several years (one Christmas I gave him a smiley face tie and he gave me a smiley candle the size of a bowling ball).

After he died, the cheap necklace was added to our "necropsy ornaments" that we hang on the tree each ear--dog collars, Seymour's tennis ball, a black leather jacket for David and now the necklace.

6. In the last years of his life, he developed vision problems.  He sometimes could read, other times, the letters made no sense to him.  After he died, a professor friend of his read about symptoms of a particular kind of brain tumor and it matched his symptoms exactly.  He had such fear of any physical problems that it's probably good he never knew it.

7. His first play was in first grade.  He had a tiny part at the very end of the Christmas play, with one line.  He waited through the whole play and then his friend Kag, who was supposed to say the line that was his cue, forgot and skipped over it, and the play ended without Paul making an appearance at all.  He was heartbroken.  (He made up for it later, for sure!)

8. He was lead singer of Lawsuit for 10 years and had such a high school following that he had to park his car on a side street because if the girls, who recognized his orange Pinto (he got the car when my father died) would knock on the door to see if they could see Paul.

9.  After Lawsuit ended he did several monologue shows which were a hit with not only his peers and his family but young and old alike.  The guy knew how to tell a story!  He was planning another show at the time of his death.

10. He loved sushi and whenever Walt was out of town, he and I would meet for a sushi lunch, which is why Walt and I now have sushi on Paul's birthday and the anniversary of his death.

11. One of everyone's favorite stories about Paul was one I wrote in my diary at the time and posted here along with a bunch of other stories.

12. He managed the theater downtown when it was a live theater (now a movie house).  He made a kind of clubhouse upstairs with couch, TV, and food, where he and his friends could meet when there was nothing to do in the theater.  He was responsible for the care of the theater and was very good about safety issues, which is why his death during a rehearsal accident was so crazy.

13. We had a very good relationship and he usually called me at least once a day to chat about something funny or some movie or something else.  I think of how it would have been if we had text messaging then.  The very last conversation we had, the morning that he died, he asked if I thought it was weird that he liked talking to his mother so often.  I told him no, that it just showed we were friends.

I miss him.

4/20 - 18

Lyrics by Phish, compliments of Ned.

Got dressed in my "missing Paul" uniform this morning.

Lots of us have FTS shirts, which Paul's best friend Kag designed and gave to everyone on Christmas in 1999.  It stands for "f*ck this sh*t" which was what Paul once told his wife he'd like to be his epitaph.  We knew we couldn't print that anywhere, but my friend Olivia suggested "FTS" and it has been a useful abbreviation for 19 years now.  I hope somewhere Paul knows that.

You probably can't see the earring, so I took a close up.

Paul and I had a joke going about happy faces, giving each other gifts with smiley faces on them.  I think it started with a dumb necklace he gave me as a joke one gift-giving occasion and has included things like a HUGE candle (basketball size) and the famous "Happy," who went with us to meet Gasper last weekend.  I'm so happy I remembered to find the earrings this year!  I bought them several years ago and think of them usually a week or so after Paul's anniversary.

I went to Atria for lunch.  Nothings works better than a lunch at the funny farm to cheer one up.  She woke up a little more clear-headed than last time, but wandered around wearing only her pajama tops for about half an hour, trying to straighten out a necklace n her dresser for literally 30 minutes, butt flapping in the breeze.  I finally got her dressed and then to the dining room.  If dementia has ever been something she could hide, it no longer is.  I don't know if the woman who eventually joined us, Betty (someone I had not met before), has dementia or not, but I suspect she does.  My mother asked many times if this were lunch and just lots of stuff like that.  I did a lot of explaining what we were doing today (flowers to the cemetery), who Paul was, etc.  Nothing new.  Just the new normal, with a bit more nudity involved this time.

When I got home, I tried to set up Skype on my iPad, but Davis Community Network has two addresses, the original one @dcn.davis.ca.us and a shortened version adopted several years later @dcn.org.  They are essentially the same address, but for some reason I am on iTunes with the short address and Apple with the long address and Apple won't recognize my password and there is no way I have figured out how to change it.  When I have time I'll try to get Apple customer service (bwahahahah...such an optimist) and see.

But because I could not get Skype installed, I was not able to have a Skype conversation with Caroline and Jane, though we were able to facetime, which is nearly as well.  Caroline entertained me with tales of her week castrating an obstreperous horse and trying to feed frozen rats to a snake, Jane talked about once babysitting for a snake, to the horror of her dinner guests, and I shared the story of our orphaned rats whom I had bottle-fed and eventually donated to the local pet store fooling myself that they would be sold as pets, while pretty certain they would end up a someone's lunch.  

In the afternoon we went to the cemetery and discovered that Jessica had gotten there first.  She always brings mayonnaise to the cemetery on 4/20 because Paul hated mayonnaise so much and she's still angry with him for dying.

We left flowers and then Walt went wandering around "the neighborhood" while I sat on a new bench engraved "the gang's all here" and looked for familiar names.  It seems that each time we come to lay flowers on the grave, we find new familiar names joining the neighborhood.

Walt and I have a plot somewhat close to this one for Paul and David, so one of these days we will be members of the neighborhood too.

At night more sushi and then home to catch up on the shows that were recorded while we were out at dinner.  Now a break for a month when it's time to commemorate Dave's 21st anniversary.

It's What We DO

Today was an example of what people do when they get to a certain age.

It was the night that Walt spends with our housebound friend, to relieve his wife so she can go out to a meeting.  The friend had a stroke several years ago and is in a wheelchair, so every 2 weeks or so Walt and a couple of other friends go out and spend a couple of hours with him to give his wife a break.

But we late this afternoon we had a call from his wife, saying she had just brought him home from the hospital, where he has been the past few days, and she didn't think she would be going out.

So instead of visiting the house-bound friend, we went to the home of our friend who has brain cancer and probably not too much longer to live.  He and his husband had been going over his will, which he made 20 or more years ago.  He discovered that many of the beneficiaries named in the will are no longer with us, so he had to draw up a new will.  He needed someone not a beneficiary to witness his signature.

So we went and visited with him for awhile, then witnessed his signature (expressing indignation that we aren't one of the beneficiaries!).  We visited a bit more, but he tires easily and so we didn't stay too long.  His husband said that the nurse, who comes every day, isn't sure if his current exhaustion is due to new medication, or just another step down the path that leads inevitably to the funeral service we talked about tonight.

I gave him a big hug when we left.  I don't know if we will ever see him again.  I noted that he seemed very warm and he has that round fat-face that I remember seeing on Peach when she was in her last weeks with her own brain cancer.

So now that we had taken care of (or not) the housebound friend and visited the dying fried, we went off for sushi to commemorate the 17th anniversary of Paul's death.  Such an upbeat day!

It's the only time we go out to dinner when I have a beer.

We were at Sushi, Unlimited, which is a chain restaurant and they give their sushi rolls cutesy local names like River Cat, King Kong, Mama Mia, Go Aggie, and I-80.  We discovered the "Lincoln Hills" a few times ago and usually order it to share.  It has spicy tuna, crab mix, deep fried shrimp, avocado, tempura crumbs, Fair Oaks sauce and sweet sauce.  Other than tuna, crab and shrimp, I'm pretty sure you won't find the other ingredients in sushi in Japan.

We also decided to try the "Dynamite," which is very similar to the Lincoln hills, but it has cucumber and a creamy chili sauce.

Each roll was cut in 4-6 slices and though it doesn't seem like enough, we both were full by the end so we came home to watch Jeopardy and have our nightly ice cream.  

And so we have put another anniversary behind us.  Dammit.  On Dave's next month, I'll be giving up Blue Apron for a meal and whipping up a batch of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese.

Tradition.