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| Wednesday, October 1, 2003 [9:13 pm update] Worried about gomobu. IM’d with Pat tonight who let me know that he needs nurses to come in to take care of him as well as managing whatever pain he’s feeling. He could leave us any day now. It’s got to be tough on Pat to be at home during all of this. He’s trying to spend as much time as possible with his dad. He’s almost too young to be so close to it. He’s 25 which is old enough to deal with death but not old enough to watch your own parent slip away. My parents each has one sibling they’re close to in the States so we were pretty close to this family. I remember going to the swimming pool at Fort MacArthur since I was 5 or so. He loved to sneak up on us in the water pretending to be a shark and pinch us. I also remember swimming through his legs. Sometimes he’d trap us. I can almost smell that blue station wagon. Actually, there were multiple station wagons. Big bowls of cereal. Bigger bowls of chocolate ice cream. He was always listening to a little transistor-type radio in the kitchen. I remember the first day my parents told me and Dave to call him gomobu. He didn’t like it all. He just wanted to be called Uncle John. Many years later, I called their house and called him Uncle John; he didn’t know who I was. When I knew him, he was gentle and funny. When I was older, I heard that he was much more mellow in his old age. I supposed he was your stereotypical old school Irish guy back in the day. He liked his war movies. I think he was a spy in WWII. I got to try rations. I remember going to Burger King after shopping at the PX and the Commissary. sigh. Lots of good childhood memories. And he was always there. |