This Sunday I found myself at the MIT fields in the middle of a downpour, watching a bunch of older guys re-live their glory days with an all-out game of rugby, tackling the shit out of each other. The game was arranged for TvS’s very-belated 50th birthday…there was at least one guy out there who had to be at least 60, and a bunch of young ringers. Some of the wives were on the sidelines, cringing every time their own went down in a pile of bodies and failed to immediately resurface.
AL snapped one of the important ligaments in his good knee (was in last year or so for ACL surgery on the other one)… LCL, or whichever one it is that keeps a knee joint from squishing around side to side. GJM presented today with a 3x swollen thumb and palm-attached-to-thumb, and grossed me out by pushing the internally-leaked blood around in it. A young kid stood too close to the sidelines and got creamed. There were some miscellaneous scrapes and bruises, and a nasty bloody cleat-in-the-eye. Afterward, we all went to the Asgard to warm up with a few cold ones. It was packed with TvS’s friends and fellow players, and then it kind of all made sense. He said this was one of the best days of his life.
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Tonight I found out that one of my little cousins has an inoperable brain tumor. Her parents have known about it for some time, but didn’t tell anyone in the family about it until recently, when symptoms became somewhat evident on their own. Instant message is not the best way to hear something like this… but I can fully understand and respect the decision to keep it quiet for so long. I couldn’t imagine the alternative, growing up with all of your relatives thinking “don’t get too attached” in the backs of their minds whenever they interacted with you.
I don’t know what happens next.
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