More good memories

Winter, 2014. My parents have been dead since fall of 2011 and I'm coping well with it. Not that I'm over it; that never happens. But I'm fine and doing a good job of managing the store I've worked in for a dozen years. I work Wednesday through Sunday, with Monday and Tuesday off. I like this. The store is busy on weekends so time goes fast and having Monday and Tuesday off means I can shop and do errands in uncrowded stores. 

A Whole Foods beer growler.

I take the train back to my suburban home. Usually, my bicycle awaits me but on weekends I drive the short distance to and from the train station, knowing that parking is free and that there will be plenty of spaces. I have a beer growler in the car and I drive to a nearby Whole Foods. It's an expensive store, yes, but this is my weekly treat. I go to the little section where they can legally sell beer and wine—a recent development in Pennsylvania at the time—and look at the list of craft beers they've written up on a chalkboard. The first thing you notice is that the higher the percentage of alcohol the beer has, the more it cost. It's a little off-putting to see this. It makes you realized that you're buying a drug and you feel uneasy about that, as if addiction is in your near future. I get intoxicated easily so I try to discount this and buy something that sounds like it will taste interesting. Not too interesting. I don't want beer that taste like chocolate or blueberries. 
I tell the Whole Foods staffer which one I'd like. He opens the growler and sniffs it to make sure it's clean. If it's not, he or one of his coworkers told me once, he won't fill it as it could make me ill and I'd blame them. That's never happened, so the growler gets filled. He seals it with a sticky thing that goes over the top. He writes the name of what I've gotten on the round part of the sticker. Later, at home, I'll stick this part on the bottle and as weeks go by it gets crowded with them. It's like I'm a fighter pilot and these are the planes I've short down. 
I pay for it and some other small special thing to go with dinner and go home. The thermostat is programmed so the house is warm when I get back. I turn on the radio, cook my meal, eat it and drink some of the beer while reading the Sunday New York Times. 
I'm alone, of course, but I've reached a point in my life where I'm fine with that. If there's any pang over this solitary meal being my Sunday dinner, the beer washes it away.

1/8/18: My last normal day

I plan to have my two brothers over tomorrow night to tell them of my grim medical condition, something I put off until after the holidays because I wanted their sons and daughters to have returned to the cities they live in and the colleges they attend. They're all back now.
I'm not looking forward to upsetting my brothers. I'm dreading the reaction. They're calm, mature men, so I don't expect that there will be too great a leap into crises mode, but I do fear that the news will be followed by more phone calls and visits than I'll want. 
We'll see. Even people you know well don't always react to things the way you think they will.
After I tell them, it will be time to tell others. Friends, old and new. I'd rather not, but considering that my leg will be amputated soon, word of some kind will get out anyway and it's good to disseminate more information than less, I think, and as I've said before, I don't want to have to explain my condition repeatedly.
 _________________________
Me, shopping, earlier today, around 1 o'clock. Bad weather had been predicted and now, a few hours later, there is a coating of ice. Schools were let out early, libraries closed. I went to a supermarket, which I'd planned to do anyway. The lines were long but nothing crazy. There are many supermarkets near me and they range from middle class ones, like Acme, to the more expensive Whole Foods. There is also a Trader Joe's and a Wegmans, all a short drive from where I live. I visit all of them over the course of a week or so as each has items I like that the others don't. 
Today, I went to the Acme. The usual types were in the express line. Harried moms, an elderly man clutching a loaf of white bread, me getting cheese, bagels, and eggs. And I see this girl. So young. So calm. So pretty. Who is she? Who does she live with? Is she a college student? What things will she see, what problems will she face in the many decades of her life that will pass between my death and hers?
Whether or not I'll be alive a year from now is a fifty-fifty proposition. If I am, it's fairly certain I won't be doing my own shopping and seeing things like this.

Shoppers in the express lane of an Acme supermarket.

Unending ends

Yesterday, the Complete and Total Loser had hours of scans of his lungs and his leg, either or both which may be harboring a kind of cancer for which there is no treatment and would kill him within a year.
The tests over, the Loser stopped off at a fancy supermarket (Whole Foods) and bought, with a gift card from a dear friend, things he usually doesn't buy. For example, he paid over $3 for a slice of pizza. It had things on it that looked delicious and nice, thick cheese. As he asked for it, the woman behind the counter said, "This one? The vegan pizza?" The Loser nearly changed his mind on hearing that it was vegan but he didn't want to reveal to the woman what a narrow-minded bigot he is so he bought it. 
He took it home, heated it up, and ate it. It was ... excellent! Much better than many regular slices he's had in his more than five decades of eating pizza, with none of the grease regular pizzas have. A nice lunch as a reward for doing without breakfast due to the tests.
Then the phone chirped. The caller I.D. showed a foreign sounding name unfamiliar to the Loser, so he answered warily. It turned out to be a doctor the Loser had never seen calling to see if the Loser was OK because the tests he'd had just a few hours before had been sent to the Loser's knee guy and found that the Loser has a pulmonary embolism. He prescribed medicine to thin the Loser's blood, which the Loser got right away. He also made an appointment to meet with the doctor the next day.
It's unlikely that the embolism will kill the Loser, but still. It's upped his tally of illnesses for 2017. 

A new fare collection device at a suburban Philadelphia train station.

So far, the Loser has or may have:

• Prostate cancer (has)
• Ascending aortic aneurysm (has)
• Sarcoma that will require leg amputation or take root in a lung and kill (may have)
• Eczema (has and it's getting worse)
• Pulmonary embolism (has)

The Loser went to the city via train. He walks slowly now, like an old man. Young people swirled around him, all good looking, dynamic, in charge. Everything is changing around the Loser and even though he's got a few months before hitting sixty, he feels increasingly out of touch and irrelevant. Part of this is the season. As he writes this, just days before the official start of winter, sunlight tilts in ways that cast long shadows and the day's end nears by 3 o'clock.

Never bored

Kids now. Never bored, always with something to do or someone to talk to. Sure, when the Complete and Total Loser was that age he might have had a comic book with him (but that's might, and no one did in a grocery store; not cool), but even with those you look up once in awhile and see what's going on around you. This boy didn't budge until it was time to leave.

A boy plays a game on his smart phone while at a grocery store.

The day off

Went to three shopping places for groceries. Trader Joe's, Acme, Whole Foods. Got dried things at Trader Joe's (banana chips, apricots) and almond butter. Got chicken at Acme (two for one packages of thighs; they taste good and "thigh"

The Loser's driveway.

is a great word), instant coffee, cut up pineapple. Got tabbouleh salad at Whole Foods (theirs is the best) and soy half-and-half, which Trader Joe's has but theirs goes bad sooner than the Loser can use it. Saw sister-in-law with her son in Whole Foods parking lot. The son, 15, is huge. The sister-in-law is a cultural cliche; tall, blond, SUV. Went home and ate tuna salad roll up from

A skinny girl.

 Trader Joe's, washed down with a seven-ounce Rolling Rock. Sent tax documents to guy brother recommended. Swept part of driveway. Doing so calms the Loser in a Zen way. Always surprising how just a few feet of sweeping fills a trash can with debris. You don't see how much there is when it's all spread out. Found claw gardening tool with long handle in garage, started tearing up part of garden in back yard, where the Loser wants to start a vegetable garden. After about nine square feet, the claw came off the handle. Old, perhaps. Mid thirties outside, which it shouldn't be, but the weather hasn't been what it should be for years, if you think about it. The outdoor work failed to warm the Loser up, as if his body's thermostat is set to spring. The Loser saw a skinny girl going sleeveless on the train platform just two days ago. 

Cheap Bastard

He, the Complete and Total Loser's father, was a cheap bastard. But in a loveable way.
He was born September 21, 1920, ninety-two years ago from the date of this post, and died last December.
Imagine being nine years old when the Great Depression starts. Even brief downturns in the economy scar us for life. The Loser got out of college during a sharp but brief one (Reagan, '81) and is still surprised when someone offers him a job. 
The last car trip the Loser's father probably made was to a supermarket three miles farther than the nearest one to save a quarter on a can of soup. He kept uncancelled postage stamps, clipped coupons and washed his own car for as long as he could, all while living in a house worth $700,000 and sitting on $1.2 million in stock. 
"I could lose it all tomorrow," he'd say, and he meant it. 
Not that he scrimped. He and the Loser's mother enjoyed life. They vacationed in St. Bart's, ate out often, and drove decent enough cars. It was on the little, everyday things that he scrimped. The Loser wanted his father to enjoy those little things and when, in those last months he'd do the shopping because he "liked to help out," he'd spend his own money on premium stuff. Acme? No. Whole Foods.
Over the past few years the Loser bought him a bottle of good scotch on Father's Day. His father may have found the brands he bought fine, but he didn't drink much and how good can scotch be if it comes in a plastic bottle? 
He died before he finished it all. The Loser is drinking one last, fairly large glass of it (for him) now to commemorate his birthday. 
Here's to you, Dad, you cheap bastard. I miss you.