My dad used to be called "Daddio" by the brotherhood of the Viking "Wolf-Pack" when we were younger, but now the older guys just referred to him as Mr. D as though he was no longer a parent, but a roommate. Mr. D moved our old hospital bed upstairs and into my bedroom. The old rusty thing had smelled like toxic metal ever since it was donated to us, back in 1962 when Puke-Breath had broken his leg into a billion pieces (Okay, 8 to be exact), That was when my brothers (affectionately known as the Wolf-Pack) climbed over the chain-link fence at Saint Marks school in their escape after breaking into the church vestry and drinking all the communion wine. There they were: 6 or 7 drunken' platinum-haired, midgets trying to pull Puke-Breath out from under 500 feet of schoolyard fence they had managed to knock over.
YEP, it made the front page of the Evening Outlook (our local newspaper) like many of the other Dahlin Exploits like the "Salton Sea" story (blog 5/13/13) and the time we "Let all the monkeys out of the Zoo" (Blog 4/29/13)
Anyway...that bed ended up being pretty handy and stayed in our dining room for years, because of all the broken bones our daring brood had suffered. (As you can see to the left we all had special climbing skills - it was like we entered military boot camp as soon as we came shooting out of the womb).
Now with the bed in my room... I felt like I had been banished to recover from the near-fatal accident when I lost the wrestling match with the glass wall at the McElliot's pool. My mom prayed to Saint Anthony and said it was a miracle that I lived. (If my mom has any hope of being canonized a saint, she said this will be one of the two miracles she needs to qualify. She said the other miracle is living in the same household as the rest of her offspring. My brothers jokingly said her second miracle was giving birth to all of us - overhearing that, my dad piped in and said that the second miracle was that there were no shallow graves in the backyard. I think what that meant, was that she didn't kill any of us. He felt - that alone was a miracle). But I think murder might nullify one's candidacy for sainthood, since it broke one of the "Ten Suggestions" Number 11 was "Thou shalt not electrify a Nun" and we already did that. The reasons they were called suggestions in our house is that we had already broke most of them.
As I lay here in that ancient, squeaky, metal-smelling, hand-crank hospital-bed I took comfort in my dog who loved me unconditionally and all the get well cards from my mom's classroom - 6S. 6 S is the classroom at Saint marks with the 33 kids in the sixth grade on the south-side of the long east-and-west running hallway - that stretches from one end of the school to the other.
I kind-of wished I had received some cards from Marilyn or Theresa or Julie or John or Andrea or Keith or Ricky or RALPH or any of the other kids in my seventh grade class...but I didn't. So again I say, thanks to mom for her rescue and to the sixth grade class, which she made write all of my get well cards. 
Anyway, the hippy-commies in my household had a big problem. Turns out that other peace-loving, anti-war, free-love hippies kept sneaking into our backyard and stealing sacks-full of carefully trimmed leaves from the my brother's coveted "Mexican Tomato Plants." So much for love and peace and anti-war - how do you spell "OXYMORON?" Like generals in a war room, they declared war on the other hippies who they now hated and began planning violent counter measures in order to protect their self-interest. Since the older boys were good at climbing, they devised a plan to steal a great, big, nasty, notorious rooster from drainage ditch near Marina Del Rey.
From the stories I heard, this rooster was 4 feet tall, had 9-inch razor-sharp talons, had one detached eyeball that hung down by its optic nerve to the goiter on its neck and attacked the chain link fence whenever anyone walked by. I could hear them downstairs plotting about the rendezvous back at "Wall Drug" to smoke some "hooch" (they called it ) and how they intended to send the "little man crew" of Ulrich, Syndrome and Cosmo over the fence of the drainage-ditch/bird-sanctuary at midnight with a burlap sack and a couple lassos.
That was bound to be a great story!
Those stories to come... in the mean time... know that Mighty Mouse is on the way...
Take comfort in a good dog... tell someone you love them. I think hearing the "L" word is a good thing...
and know even when you don't hear someone say the words you long to hear - that you are loved and pursued by the Greatest Love in the universe.
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