Monday
Then: Couples
Men, while leaning on your guy friends is a vital pursuit when seeking beams from others, just as important is to proactively reach out with your wife or girlfriend to other couples. In my case, two couples were significant to my good outcome.
The first was Mary and Jim Frey.
We first became close friends during the International Juggler’s Convention in Pittsburgh in 1998 where we both had 13-year-old juggler sons tossing batons shoulder-to-shoulder with a menagerie of odd characters. Most looked like the scruffy performers you see at street fairs and Renaissance Festivals. Previously, we had never realized that these goofballs had a pre-season pow-wow like this.
As Jim and Mary Frey and I sat joking about what was really a deep-seated fear about our sons' futures, we simultaneously stole a glance in a classroom as the door opened and instantly we all convulsed in laughter to the point of tears. Our unspoken fear? Were our impressionable sons going to be smitten with scruffiness this weekend, only to skip college in a few years and then we’d have to catch up with them at the Fargo North Dakota Renaissance Festival?
The glance that released the laughter? Inside a college classroom were rows of scruffy characters facing an instructor just like sweaty aerobics huffers and puffers do. But there was no Spandex here, thank god. Instead, all manner of gypsies, gadflies and even college professors were intently following the instructor. This wizard of weirdness had a three-foot long board onto which were glued five white teacups. With amazing ease and dexterity, the instructor was bouncing a golf ball from cup to cup with mere flicks of the wrist. The students, tea-cupped boards in hand, were trying mightily to duplicate this feat. And dropping boinking balls all over the floor.
I know we all felt exactly the same through our laughter: “Yes, we are exceptional parents to be exposing our sons to such culture.”
Jim and Mary juggled their busy lives during the year of my diagnosis and surgery to spend wonderful and warm evenings with us.
I’m also reminded that I got more entertainment during the last year from Jim and his friend, advertising agency owner Tom Hayes. They have an encyclopedic memory of ribald and bawdy old limericks, and they would recite these tag-team style at various gatherings.
I recently flipped through the 1957 Paris Edition of Limericks, 1700 of them collected from the 1870’s to 1952, and amazingly I came across one featuring a prostate. It’s sacrilegious, but also very funny. Skip over it if you're easily offended:
When Paul the Apostle lay prostrate
And leisurely prodded his prostate
With pride parabolic
His most apostolic
Appendage became an apostate
Not satisfied with this one, I stole the rhyming forms in it to create my own limerick:
When Doc laid patient prostrate
And roughly prodded his prostate
With fingers hyper-kinetic
The chap’s gland felt pathetic
Sending him home with a shaky gait
Or a variation in the last line:
Sending him off with uncertain fate ¶ 1:05 PM
The first was Mary and Jim Frey.
We first became close friends during the International Juggler’s Convention in Pittsburgh in 1998 where we both had 13-year-old juggler sons tossing batons shoulder-to-shoulder with a menagerie of odd characters. Most looked like the scruffy performers you see at street fairs and Renaissance Festivals. Previously, we had never realized that these goofballs had a pre-season pow-wow like this.
As Jim and Mary Frey and I sat joking about what was really a deep-seated fear about our sons' futures, we simultaneously stole a glance in a classroom as the door opened and instantly we all convulsed in laughter to the point of tears. Our unspoken fear? Were our impressionable sons going to be smitten with scruffiness this weekend, only to skip college in a few years and then we’d have to catch up with them at the Fargo North Dakota Renaissance Festival?
The glance that released the laughter? Inside a college classroom were rows of scruffy characters facing an instructor just like sweaty aerobics huffers and puffers do. But there was no Spandex here, thank god. Instead, all manner of gypsies, gadflies and even college professors were intently following the instructor. This wizard of weirdness had a three-foot long board onto which were glued five white teacups. With amazing ease and dexterity, the instructor was bouncing a golf ball from cup to cup with mere flicks of the wrist. The students, tea-cupped boards in hand, were trying mightily to duplicate this feat. And dropping boinking balls all over the floor.
I know we all felt exactly the same through our laughter: “Yes, we are exceptional parents to be exposing our sons to such culture.”
Jim and Mary juggled their busy lives during the year of my diagnosis and surgery to spend wonderful and warm evenings with us.
I’m also reminded that I got more entertainment during the last year from Jim and his friend, advertising agency owner Tom Hayes. They have an encyclopedic memory of ribald and bawdy old limericks, and they would recite these tag-team style at various gatherings.
I recently flipped through the 1957 Paris Edition of Limericks, 1700 of them collected from the 1870’s to 1952, and amazingly I came across one featuring a prostate. It’s sacrilegious, but also very funny. Skip over it if you're easily offended:
When Paul the Apostle lay prostrate
And leisurely prodded his prostate
With pride parabolic
His most apostolic
Appendage became an apostate
Not satisfied with this one, I stole the rhyming forms in it to create my own limerick:
When Doc laid patient prostrate
And roughly prodded his prostate
With fingers hyper-kinetic
The chap’s gland felt pathetic
Sending him home with a shaky gait
Or a variation in the last line:
Sending him off with uncertain fate ¶ 1:05 PM
