the goodyear blimp (not the fat girl that works at the tire store)

i still remember august of 1996 when i “broke the seal”…

…and i don’t mean that incident that got me banned from seaworld for a decade or so. my lawyers tell me to keep mentioning that to a minimum.

no, this was when i finally walked into mom’s room and made it mine. she died in there – and after we had retrieved some of her stuff to be buried with her (can’t take it with you my ass!) i shut the door to the room on the day of her funeral…and didn’t open it for six months.

i felt that was long enough.

when i went through her room i found a tremendous amount of junk and paperwork and bills (there’s a hoarder gene on my mom’s side i try desperately to not let overtake me) and when i got through the initial layer of her closet (clothes, shoes, etc) i started to find some interesting and occasionally depressing stuff – like the wedding cake topper from her & dad’s wedding, still saved in this closet even though the house was moved in to a year after the divorce. and an old anniversary card she’d bought him but never got to give him. explained why she kinda cried when she saw i wore the wedding ring she had given my dad as a pinky ring – he had given it to me, and that was where it fit…as it was inscribed on the inside i’d never have it sized up. but when she asked where i got it, i explained how dad had given it to me and i decided i’d wear it ’cause she had picked it out to be worn by a guy that would love her till she died, and that wasn’t him…but it was me.

in hindsight i guess that was a pretty sweet thing to say. moving on…

behind the wardrobe dysfunction (love my mom, but her taste in clothes kinda sucked) and the boxes of old bills and books from the 1800’s i found old toys of mine that she took when they broke and she said she would fix them…

…but that never happened.

the main one?

a rather large model of the goodyear blimp that dad bought me on one of his earlier, rare as hell “i’ll be a father for a couple days” weekends in the late 70’s (before he disappeared until the mid 90’s) that i had built, and it was cool as hell ’cause it had signs that lit up that you could custom make ($30 – $100 bucks on eBay currently for anybody curious – is it wrong i want it for sentimental reasons, but DON’T want it ’cause the goodyear tires that were on the bmw when i got it proved to be kinda shit?). it was broken beyond repair, more so than when i had given it to her to fix, as it looked like something might have fallen on it.

love my mom, but she wasn’t mrs. fix-it, that’s for sure.

so tonight the ufc’s kid went to show me a toy he thought was cool – one of those spinner jobs where you push the button and an egg spins open to show some creature inside? this one was from florida so it was an alligator. picture what’s below, but with an alligator instead of some broad:

but he had to pry the egg open ’cause the button didn’t work. i asked to see it and borrowed a small phillips screwdriver from the ufc as she put him to bed…and before he dozed off, i walked in and showed him it was fixed.

that felt awesome.

don’t know if i’d ever make a good parent, but i think i might make a pretty good step parent. and what’s the difference? $1,000.00 in my bank account from shane, that’s what. yeah, buddy – thought i forgot, didn’t ya? go ahead and say something…i fixed the problem with the comments section!