The Radio's Talking

In my dream, I could hear the sound of a policeman’s radio. I just couldn’t remember the context, if it was in the middle of a bust or watching “America’s Worst Drivers” or some other FOX network program. You know, the kind where they recreate all the sounds of car crashes and the dispatcher says little things like “They’re heading southbound on Madison” in the background.

I woke up when our oldest boy came into our bed at around four this morning. Sweetie had to work late last night and so I was left with the duty of putting them to bed. It’s not that hard to do, both boys go to bed real easy for the most part, but you can always tell that it’s not the way they’d prefer. So anyway, after everyone gets re-settled and I’m just starting to drift off, I think I hear the police radio again. So I sit up and listen real hard to see if I can hear it or if I’m just doing some sort of post-REM hallucination due to the hours I’ve been keeping.

Silence…

Then from the quiet of our singlewide I hear the familiar wail of our youngest one who has taken this moment to tell the world that it has pissed him off for the last time and that now, like Aguirre, he will show it the full fury of his wrath.

Sweetie gets up to deal with it and even after much padding back and forth for clean diapers and Tylenol, Ike is still trying to tell anyone who’ll listen that he’s been dealt a raw deal and if you like it so much why don’t you have a full cast on YOUR leg. Then in the midst of all that clamor, with my nose running from the remnants of last weeks cold and of a four-year-old kicking my kidneys, I hear it again.

Not loud enough to understand what’s being said, but loud enough to know something’s going on. This must be the longest bust in the history of Tacoma I’m thinking at this point, so since my bladder was full after the kidney assault I decided I could get up and empty it and see what all the commotion was about outside.

I’m looking out every window we have and I don’t see any cops. Could they have packed it all up in the few minutes it took me to sit on the john? I can’t imagine how, but I start to head back to bed when out of the living room I hear it again. There on the table was Sweeties walkie-talkie, which she had forgotten to turn off after work. She almost never brings it home anymore so it had never occurred to me that that might be what it is.

I stopped by Ike’s room to see if there was anything I could do to help. There wasn’t. Sweetie had made sure he was comfortable and even though he was still pissed off, she decided to leave him in there to work it out on his own.

I got back to sleep about six after the house had gone quiet. The next thing I remember is Sweetie telling me to get up or I’d be late for work. Though I had set my alarm to go off at six thirty I have little recollection of having turned it off instead of just pushing the snooze bar. Standing in the shower, I can’t remember if I’ve just washed my hair or only gotten it wet.

The Vulgar Boatmen

I thought for some reason I would talk today about how much I like the band The Vulgar Boatmen. Sure my littlest boy has a cast on his leg for the next three weeks and my other boy is bored out of his skull because his friend from across the way is in Main visiting for the next two. Sure that means a lot more stress in our little singlewide. Heck Sweetie and I haven’t hardly even found the time to give each other a peck on the cheek before our heads hit the pillow lately. Our life is such a jumble right now that opening a can of Chicken Noodle Soup seems like a hard cooked meal. Like we’ve been slaving over the stove all afternoon. So why waste my web breath on talking about an obscure band that only a hand full of people have ever heard of? Um…so I don’t have to re-read the paragraph I just wrote again?

The older boy and I went to a birthday party the other weekend. Corlis’ daughter was turning four and since we were looking for distraction we bought some art supplies and went. It was race weekend and the boats were on the water. I say this because my friend Corlis lives right near the lake so it was a bit of a mess getting to his house, having to circumnavigate a number of barricades and more than a few drunken race goers to get there. Glad we went though. I guess he had gone though some of his old cassettes for the party and one of them was “You and Your Sister” by The Vulgar Boatmen. It was really nice to hear. Somehow my copy had made it into my cassette box at home and never made it out again. Cassettes are fast becoming the LP of the nineties. Now that you can burn a CD quicker and cheaper than you can record a cassette they have been delegated to live in a dark corner of my recording studio.

After we got back home I fished that tape out and have been playing it ever since. Spent yesterday on the web trying to see if there was a site and came upon the one above. They got some mp3’s that you can download if you want.

TVB are a band out of Indiana and when they came to Seattle in the early nineties our good friend Minnie (who was living here then) knew the drummer so we all went. I’m not sure how exactly but I had already scored their tape and liked it quite a bit before we even went to the show. My memory has us seeing them at Rock Candy, a now defunct rock club near I-5. The put on a good show and Andy, the drummer, was pretty surprised to be seeing Minnie so far from home. We hung out afterwards and listened to the two of them go on and on about mutual friends they knew and drank beer in plastic cups.

I felt pretty sure that the band would have broken up by now, but by the looks of things I guess there still getting together every now and again and putting on a show. I wish them well. Not fame, but happiness.

Ike Surgury

Well, Ike did just fine last Friday with his surgery. It wound up being a little more complicated than we had originally thought it would. Turns out they had to break the bone in his leg as well as just lengthening the tendon.

Our neighbors showed up with a little breakfast for us to eat in the waiting room. We had to be at the hospital at 6 a.m. so we were feeling a little groggy and in need of a cup of coffee. Made for a welcome site at any rate.

We were checked into our room before they came to get us and out the window we watched the rain on the foothills of the Cascades. The Mountain was hiding in a bank of clouds and way off in the distance someone was riding in a hot air balloon. The view from his room overlooks Wright’s Park and most of Tacoma’s downtown.

Later that night, after we were back in the room and had both taken naps, Rainier came out from it’s hiding place and we watched it turn from a soft pink to a deep red as the setting sun did its thing.

Ike had visitors throughout the day. Most just came by for a minute or two before letting us be. The neighbors came by in the evening and brought us dinner from Li Li’s, a Vietnamese restaurant not far from the hospital.

Ike spent most of the day on morphine, coming in and out of consciousness like you do when you’re on heavy drugs. We decided early on this trip that we would aggressively treat his pain with drugs. The last time we were here there were a number of airway issues that we had to contend with that limited our ability to sedate him. But this trip we had no such issues.

Mostly on our trips to the hospital, after the excitement starts to wane and the boy is sleeping, Sweetie and I look for hospital supplies to pilfer. For those of you who might not know, there is a rule in hospitals that just about anything that is in the patients room belongs to the patient. Not machines that beep or bedding or furniture not the big stuff, but just about anything else. Tape, Kleenex, split gauze, bacitracin, shampoo, hand lotion, PediaSure, hand soap, bottled water and cereal. Outside of Ike’s room is a nurse’s supply-station, which is like the Wall Mart of medical goodies.

When you’ve spent as much time in the hospital as we have, you come to learn that there are things that one can only get in the hospital. Things like these little green sponges on the end of a plastic stick. Perfect for swabbing out his mouth with a little cool water when he’s not feeling all that well. Or medical tape. There are more types of medical tape than you could ever imagine, most of them useful for one thing or another. Sometimes there are batteries or giant rubber bands, battery powered vibrators (to help infants lungs clear they say…) infant tubs and washcloths. We’ve found that rubber gloves work great for cleaning up after puttering around the garden. There are bags of diapers, boxes of wipes and plastic utensils for the next bar-b-q.

This time we got a new car seat out of the deal. With his new body cast he no longer fits into his old car seat so his hospital bill pays for the new one. We took one of the blankets as well, though those technically are supposed to stay in the hospital.

Saturday, Ike slept most of the morning away, which was fine with us. It was a good sign we thought, since he must have been feeling more comfortable. Gave us the window of opportunity to get the hell out of there and come home.

Today, Ike is feeling a little bit more like his old self though he is still fairly uncomfortable. We just try to keep up with his pain medication as best we can and know that after a few more days he’ll be as good as new. Well at least as good as can be expected having a cast that covers a good part of his body. He’s a real trooper though and even when he’s in some pain, he tries to give you a little smile to let you know he’s gonna be just fine.