KENO'S HOME PAGE
Parts of the following was first published in the Crestone Eagle a few years
back, where I used to write up Mumbo Jumbo, before taking it online, in part because of
too much editing going on to articles at the Eagle, including my own. Below is the unedited,
full version of this story, which was republished at the old, now former Gasland
message board, which today is a poll board. Since I didn't want it to be lost
there, I'll repost it here on my own home page website, with the lost text restored,
and where I now keep some of my other old newspaper articles from years past:
It's A Gas, Gas, Gas Message Board
Mumbo Jumbo, for July
2020
Okay, so the following is this month's Mumbo Jumbo. Nothing political for July,
nothing too exciting, nothing related to music or sports, but just a few stories
about my family - but no, no bragging about my kids here, either, like some
parents do. That kind of talk is just too boring to read, I rather tell stories
that are more human like, how bad things happen to everybody - but with some
love, caring, hope and unity you get through it all. That is how most families
get by, right? Reading real life stories are interesting, it makes you realize
that all of us really are the same, and yes, what happens to others, really
happens (in different ways) to everybody else, too. That's how life is for all
of us.
But anyway, when you have a health scare and then a hospital visit and surgery,
like what I had a couple of weeks ago, you think of the people who are there for
you in such times. That being for most of us, our family members, like one's
spouse, or our kids, or if you’re young, your parents. So with that in mind, for
this month’s edition of Mumbo Jumbo, I’ll write a bit about my oldest daughter
Jackie, and more so about her youngest son and my youngest grandson, Cooper.
Most of this comes from the original Mumbo Jumbo that
I used to write for my town's newspaper, the Eagle. But some was added to what I
first wrote, like the opening paragraph, but still, most comes from the original
article, other than I left in what was edited out by the paper.
Mumbo Jumbo, for July: Family
I started to help my daughter Jackie
in raising her son (and my grandson) Cooper, after his first year of life, several
months after his mother was diagnosed with cancer. He
turned 20 several weeks ago, and it’s a wonderful thing seeing him
becoming a man and leaving his teen years behind him. Now I see that our roles are
starting to change, as he no longer needs me to care for him, yet he was the one
who got me to and back home from my latest hospital visit; so now he does things
for me, including things that I used to do for him.
Like most parents, I love all of my kids the same, but knowing that Coop is the
last child I’ll ever raise is especially pleasing, indeed! I’ve been raising
children for almost 50 years, and that must be at least 25 years longer than
average from the normal time frame for when most parents raise their kids,
depending on how many offspring any parent raises. I recall my late wife Sue and
I, when our 2 girls were young, that we would talk about how by the time we hit
our 40s, we would be finished raising our girls and be totally free for the rest
of our lives to do whatever we wanted to do (since we had them at a young age).
But things don’t always work out the way you think they will. I ended up having
a son when I was in my 30s, with a gal who had been after me for a couple of
years, and that in turn lead to the wife moving out and becoming my ex for a few
years, until we patched things up. But that’s another story that I won’t get
into, other than back then was when I first learned what it was like to be a
single parent to a child. But in time I would get to play that role once again
with Cooper, after Sue died when he was 10, and at times there was just the 2 of us
left to our family (as his mom was living out of town for awhile). But Coop is one interesting and different kind of kid for
sure.
So here was the deal with Cooper. A week before he was born, I had no clue his
mother was even pregnant – and yet she was living with me in Manitou Springs,
Colorado, along with her two
other sons, who were 6 and 8 years old at the time. Jackie didn’t tell me at
first that she was having another kid, since early on she was thinking of
getting an abortion, as she and her husband were already planning to divorce and
were no longer living together. The 2 of them were just like Sue and I, they
were constantly breaking up and then getting back together again. But not this
time.
Jackie knew while I supported a woman’s right to choose, I still hated abortion
and she figured I would try to talk her out of it, even if deep down she knew I
would be against her having a third child with her soon to be ex-husband. Then
after she decided to keep the baby, she was too afraid to tell me, so she
didn’t, not until one day - just a week before she had him. That day was on the
same day that she was leaving town. But let me back up a bit first. Before she
got a chance to speak to me about this, and again, on what was the same day that
she and her 2 boys were heading to Minneapolis (where her husband had moved to a
few months earlier), she had at first only told me that she had to see him since
she needed to speak to him in person. This was just 6 weeks before the end of
the school year and I told her she should wait until the boys’ school got out,
and then go. I also told her the last thing she should do was go back to him, as
he was messing around on her with a woman who in 2 years’ time would be his new
wife. Of course, Jack didn’t want to believe this and just wanted the jerk back.
But then the phone rang, and it was her sister Debbie calling. After I spoke to
Deb, she talked to Jackie for what seem like forever. After she finally got off
the phone, Jackie was ready to get back to telling me the news she wanted to
speak to me about before her sister called, only I didn’t realize it. The first
words out of her mouth after the call were, “So, I got to tell you something,
you’re going to be a grandpa again in the next 2 months”. When she said that I
said to her “Deb is having another baby, why didn’t she tell me that herself?”.
Then before Jackie could say another word, I realized something and said to her
“Wait, she had her tubes tied after Alex was born last year, she can’t be
pregnant!... what happened?” Jack looked at me like I was crazy and replies
“Debbie isn’t pregnant, I am!” I was shocked to say the least and I said to her,
“But you don’t even have a baby bump, how can you be having a baby in the next 2
months?”. She then pulled up her shirt and sure as shit she did have a baby
bump! How I never noticed it, well I don’t know, but I never did, and I started
to cry after that and I’m not the kind of man who ever cries unless perhaps
somebody I love dies, or something real bad happens to somebody I love. But the
last thing my daughter needed was another child to raise – and now with no
husband.
Anyway, what none of us knew yet, including herself, was that Jackie was already
sick with a very rare form of blood cancer, called essential thrombosis (aka
ET). It’s so rare that even today doctors aren’t sure how to treat it properly
(and yes, I have talked about this here before). Mainly only old people past 80
get this and it’s even rare in that age group. Anyway, she wasn’t diagnosed with
this until shortly after Cooper’s premature birth just one week later. Yes,
Cooper came way too early because of his mother’s illness and was a preterm
baby, weighing under 4 pounds at birth; he almost didn’t make it past his first
week of life since he was so small. He spent the first 2 months of his life in
the hospital as it was. A week after his birth, his mother became very sick, as
she wasn’t paying attention to herself because she was worried about her baby
and didn’t pay attention to problems she was having with her fingers, which were
discolored and hurting her bad. To make a long story short, she ended up having
her right index finger amputated, and was then told she had ET - after more than
a week passed, since at first, they had no clue what was wrong with her. ET is
that rare, especially in young persons, and unlike most other cancers, two
things are different. First, in its present form it cannot kill anybody
directly, and if you are one of the few younger persons who gets it, as long as
one takes care of themselves, they can live full lives with it. But, if you
aren’t careful, it can turn into leukemia, and that can and does kill many. The
other thing with ET, is nobody who has it, beats it with treatment, as once you
have it – you got it for life, as it never goes into remission. Jackie still has
it now 20 years later and has been taking and must continue to take, chemo pills
every single day for the rest of her life. The saddest thing was when Cooper was
only about 5 or so, he learned about his mother’s illness from his middle
brother Colt, and he learned that his mother got sick when she was carrying him.
So, he started to think he was the cause of her illness, and one day as a
preteen said to me that he wished he never had been born since he made his
mother sick and hurt her. Of course, that wasn’t the case, even if elevated
blood platelets, one of the main side effects from ET, does happen in some
pregnancies, and that did lead to her losing her index finger. So, I had to have
a long talk with my grandson and explain to him that he had nothing at all to do
with his mother’s illness and he needed to stop thinking that he did and forget
about it, since it wasn’t so. Thank goodness, as he got older, he did stop
thinking in that way.
But Jackie still gets sick often from her cancer and after Cooper’s first year
of life she felt she couldn’t take care of him alone anymore and moved back in
with her mother and I. Sue and I pretty much took over raising Coop at that time
while his mother eventually moved away from Colorado for a while and left him
with us. But by the time he was about 2 or so, his grandmother started to also
get sick. At first she had COPD, and she would have to leave Colorado for weeks
at a time for lower ground, while Coop stayed with me. Living up at 8,000 feet
plus in Crestone (where we moved to in 2002)
was just too high up for her, even with her oxygen tank pumping out air at the
maximum amounts. Sue left Colorado for good in March of 2010, and then was
diagnosed with lung cancer less than a year later in Wichita, Kansas, where she
had gone to live with our youngest daughter Debbie. She died fast, just 10 days
after the diagnosis, so fast that Cooper and I never had a chance to go see her
again to say our goodbyes to her.
Lucky for me, Coop was for the most part, a real good kid once he made it into
his teens a few years after that. Really, he was nothing like I was as a teen,
he never got himself busted (like I did), he never did drugs (like I did), and
he didn’t hang out with the wrong kids (like I sometimes did). He also broke a
bad streak that my 3 other grandsons in my family had going - having baby boys
with their girlfriends while still in their teens (just like their granddad,
other than for me it wasn’t a son, but a daughter). I have 4 grandsons today
(not counting the great-grandsons), with Coop the youngest of them, and the
first 3 (Coop’s 2 older brothers and his one male cousin) all had their sons
born to them at the age of 19. Yes, Cooper broke that streak, as he at least
knew how birth control worked, and I think he learned from his older brothers
how bad it was having a baby as a teen. I guess the only good thing with the
other 3 boys was they learned their lesson and stopped playing the messing
around game, whereas Coop on the other hand, after breaking up with the one gal
he dated for 3 years while in high school, just after he graduated from school
(last year) and after not seeing anybody for several weeks, started to date
girls again, and became a player. He was taking full advantage of his good looks
and knows how to charm girls in a way I never knew. It took me months to realize
that he was a player, since he got a job working an hour away from here and was
only coming back home on weekends. But it was at Xmas when I saw the light, as
he was off from work for 2 weeks and during a ten-day period, he came home at
night with 4 different girls. I asked him after he showed up with the 4th gal,
just what was up with all the different girls in such a short period of time,
and he claimed at first that he wasn’t having sex with any of them, and that
they were just sleeping together (using the nonsexual use of the word) and
nothing more. I then informed him that the walls in our home were thin and I was
his age once too, and well, he then knew that I knew he wasn’t being truthful to
me. I guess one true fault Coop has, is he is terrible when he tries to make up
stories when he’s telling a white lie.
I guess his playing around is his only other true fault today, and even in a
pandemic, he at first hadn’t changed his ways, which lead me in early March to
ask him to move out, since he wasn’t isolating himself at all, while I myself
was big time, and was worrying that I might get sick thanks to him - and my age.
Anyway, between March and May, he lived with 3 different girls, lasting a few
weeks with each of them until he moved on. Then after he promised me he was done
with his playing around, I let him live here again, about 6 weeks ago, since his
job still hasn’t opened up again (which is fine with him since he’s making more
a week on unemployment thanks to the extra money the government is throwing in
right now). So yes, he’s back and is now seeing this one girl that he’s known
since the two were in kindergarten together, and who lives a few blocks up from
here. But she hasn’t spent any nights here, either, although there’s been
several nights where he didn’t come home, too. So, while he still doesn’t do any
drugs and isn’t a big drinker, I guess playing around is his only true drug of
choice. Of course, that can become a problem for him in the future if he doesn’t
watch himself.
But still, for a kid who just got out of his teens,
his teenage years weren’t too bad at all, other than perhaps liking girls a bit too much. But even in
his preteen years – well, even then he liked girls a bit too much. But again, he
was just a preteen. He was a cute little boy back then, who everybody at school
loved, even the older high school kids loved him (his school was K thru 12), for
sure the favorite boy in his school (and no, that isn’t just his grandpa
talking). But I guess I should have realized when he was still in kindergarten
and first grade, that future girl problems might show up, since at that time and
for the longest time, he had 3 different girlfriends at the same time. But it
was only puppy love with all 3, and nothing more. Yet he didn’t think or
understand that you only are supposed to have one girlfriend at a time. Me and
the wife thought it was funny and didn’t realize what it would lead to in his
teen years. That was perhaps my fault, I should have told him to pick just one
girlfriend and no more than one girlfriend at a time was acceptable. Period. But
I was thinking at the time that since it was true puppy love, there was no harm
being done. Plus, I knew the 3 girls’ parents, and they all thought it was funny
how he was, too.
Now there was one thing that Cooper was really good at before his teen years,
and that was getting into trouble. Like the time when he and his best friend
Zach tagged the outside of our log house (and his mother’s car, too) with a
black magic marker. After I couldn’t get it removed at first, I made a NSC post
here at this board (remember the good old NSC posts we used to have here when it
was still a Stones board?), asking for suggestions on how to remove the
graffiti, and well, it was a Gasser who saved the day with a suggestion (I think
the suggestion was to use nail polish remover?) and the suggestion worked and I
was able to remove the graffiti safely from my logs. But that was my grandson as
a boy, if he wasn’t getting himself into trouble, then he was getting himself
hurt.
I recall one snowy night about 15 years ago with him, as even when he wasn’t
trying to get into trouble, trouble would find him. Today in our isolated small
town, we have no police and just one sheriff deputy to watch over a population
of around 2,000 people. But up until about 6 or 7 years ago, we really had none
at all here, and whoever was working the night shift out of the county sheriff's
home office - 45 minutes away from here, would cover the entire county alone,
and this being a county that is so large (land wise) that it’s larger than Rhode
Island and Delaware combined. But the population back 15 years ago for the
entire county was only around 5,000 people, and the second largest town in the
county, on its south end, did (and still does) have its own small police
department, too.
But anyway, back on that night 15 years ago, just before midnight on a Friday,
there was a knock on the door. We were having a real bad snowstorm that evening
and I couldn't imagine who would be knocking on our door so late with the
weather conditions so bad. When I answered the door, to my surprise, was a
sheriff deputy standing there. I think he must have noticed the surprised look
on my face as I opened the door and saw him, and he asks me "Is everybody okay
in there?". So I told him all was fine, and he tells me that 911 had a hang-up
call from our landline almost an hour earlier. I told him I hadn't used the
phone at all that night. He then asked me if I was home alone, and I told him
no, that my wife, and my 2 grandsons, were there too, and we were all okay. So
he asked me to check on them before he left and I let him inside the house by
the front door and went upstairs to check on my family. The wife was already in
bed asleep, and my grandson Colt was in his room playing video games, but Coop,
who was only 5 at the time, was nowhere to be found. So, I called out to him
more than once, but no answer. Thing was, he was in the same room I was in no
more than 5 minutes before the deputy knocked on the door, playing with his toys
on the floor, but at this moment I couldn't find him and he wasn't answering my
calls for him. I realized at this time that it had to be he who called 911 and
that he must be hiding, and I told the deputy all that. As soon as those words
came out of my mouth, from behind the living room couch, about 15 feet away from
the 2 of us, we hear the words "I didn't call anybody grandpa!". So I pulled my
boy out from his hiding place and as I’m doing this he says to me in a trembling
voice, "Am I going to be arrested and go to jail?", and gives me a bear hug,
thinking he was gonna be taken away by the deputy! The deputy seeing how scared
he was, told him that they didn't arrest little boys for such a thing, and I
then told him not to lie and tell us the truth as to what happened, and he
confessed that he made the call. I had told him about 911 a few weeks earlier
and I guess he was curious about it. So I got him to apologize for what he did.
I then asked the deputy why the 911 operator didn’t call us back before sending
him out in a snowstorm to make sure all was okay. I was told that was the policy
and they did that, but that they were getting a busy signal and when they got
the phone operator to check the line, it was a dead line and nobody was talking
on the line (and when that happens, they got to send the law over for a welfare
check). So I checked, and sure enough, the phone in the kitchen was off the
hook! I then apologized to the deputy and he just told me that he was happy all
was well and it was no big deal that he had to drive so far over to our home (at
midnight and in a snowstorm yet), since it was his job to do that. I still felt
terrible about this, thanked him for checking on us, and after he left, I
had a long talk with my boy and then gave him a 15-minute timeout, standing in
the hallway corner (something he hated - but got to do often enough, since I
was never the kind of parent who ever hit his kids when they got into trouble.
Timeouts worked so much better!). So, Coop went into the corner and I went back
to work on the computer and lost count of the time. About a half hour later I
realized that, and found Coop still in the corner, fast asleep.
Cooper was also good at getting hurt as a boy. Yet this was a little boy who
never cried over anything. I actually thought something was wrong with him,
after all, all little kids cry a bit once in a while, as all my other kids did.
His mother would say that the only time she ever heard him cry was the minute he
popped out of her at his birth, and that was it! It was also interesting too
that his best friend, Zach, who was 2 years and 5 months older than him, and my
best friend Willie’s boy, lived with us 5 days a week, since his dad, who was
actually a year older than me, was a single parent who never been married before
and had no clue on how to raise a child, since he never raised one before. But
at least Willie paid us child support weekly, too, so Zach never cost us a dime
and still spent weekends with his dad. But unlike Cooper, Zach on the other hand
was a crybaby to the max, talk about a kid who would cry over spilled milk!
Anyway, one day – and this was a good year plus after the visit by the deputy
took place, so Coop was 6 at this time. But it was a summer weekday and I can
recall what I was doing, working on the computer putting together the domain’s
polls that would start up on Sunday night (gosh, I really have been running the
polls for such a long time!). Anyway, it was a real nice day and the 3 boys
(Colt, Coop, and Zach) were outside in front of the house playing baseball when
all of a sudden, Zach comes running into the house screaming “Keno, Keno! Cooper
just got hurt really bad! Colt hit a line drive and it hit him in his eye!”. An
instant chill went down my spine on hearing this, since when I was a boy, of
about 10 or so, the same thing happened to me! It was like an instant flashback
hit me and I remembered as I raced outside how much it hurt and I ended up with
a shiner from it. But back then in NY, we were playing stickball in the street,
and when you play stickball, you use a rubber ball. My boys on this day were
playing with a hardball. When I got outside to see how bad he might be hurt –
Coop was nowhere to be found. His brother, who is six years older than he, was
sitting on a tree stump with his hands over his eyes weeping over what had
happened, but Cooper was not around. “Colt, what happened!?” I asked. "I can’t
believe I just hurt my little brother” he cried out. “Where is he!?” I asked,
and Colt looks up and says “He was just here a second ago, I didn’t realize he
left! Where did he go?”. Then Zach points out that the garage door was open, and
it’s an attached garage with another door in the back that leads into our house
via the sunroom, and then I realized that Coop had to have gone into the house
thru the garage door as we were heading out the front door. Sure enough he did,
and we found him in the hallway sitting on the floor clutching and covering his
left eye with his hands. So I got down on the floor with him and asked him if he
was all right. In a painful voice he says, “I’m fine grandpa”. But he was also
shaking like a leaf, too, and I could tell he was hurting. “Let me see your eye
son” I said to him and I got back a strong reply of “NO! I’m fine!”, followed by
“I’m not going to no doctor!”. I told him if he was fine, he won’t need a
doctor, but he had to let me see his eye first. So he slowly removes his hands
from his eye and holy shit, his eye was in real bad shape and swelling up by the
second, this was way beyond a normal black eye and there was no question he
needed to be rushed to the emergency room, and the nearest hospital was a good
hour’s drive away. But just the sight of his eye made the other 2 other boys
shed tears and gave me a sick feeling inside, it was a real ugly, bad wound!
Then I realized at that very moment, the boy wasn’t crying at all! So I said to
him “Cooper, you were just hit by a hard ball to your eye and you’re hurt, and
your shaking, but you’re not crying. Why aren’t you crying? What’s wrong with
you?” He gave me a funny look with his one good eye as if to say, okay I’ll cry,
and then he let out a scream and cry that I will never forget hearing; it was
the most dreadful scream and cry I ever heard from anybody, and then he started
to sob uncontrollably, to the point that I wished I never had said anything to
him about crying in the first place. The crazy thing is I would only hear him
cry again one more time, and that would be many years later in his late teens,
on the day he broke up with his longtime girlfriend via a phone call that I
unfortunately got to hear.
Today Cooper still has 20/20 vision in his right eye, but sadly has 20/50 vision
in his left eye, as he did suffer some permanent damage to the eye from the
hardball hitting it. Yet you would think that’s enough damage to a loved one in
your family as far as an injured eye goes, but it wasn’t. Cooper’s mother,
Jackie, as I noted, has her rare form of blood cancer. Anyway, to make yet
another long story real short (and one that I already told here years ago), Jack
gets these seizures every so often, caused directly from her illness. But they
aren’t like a true epileptic seizure, as she doesn’t really shake at all.
Instead, when she gets hers, she passes out and loses consciousness for about 10
or 20 seconds at most, and then comes to again (she can’t drive anymore because
of this, even though she hasn’t had any for a few years now). But if she is
sitting down when it hits her, she won’t even know it happened, since she
doesn’t even feel it coming on. But one day 8 years ago, she had one of these
and fell into and through a new uninstalled glass window that was sitting on the
garage floor of her friend’s house. Some of the broken glass entered her left
eye, and she has been totally blind in that one eye since. So, what’s the odds
that both a mother and son would have one eye each, damaged? Coop was lucky in a
way, compared to what happened to his mom, but now today when he drives, he does
have to wear glasses.
So that’s Mumbo Jumbo for July. I guess one might wonder if I have any happy
stories about my kids to tell, and of course I do. But such stories are on the
boring side and come off sounding like nothing but what a bragging parent would
tell, and I’ve never been such a person. So you got these stories instead. I bet
if I told you the story about Cooper in his senior year at high school leading
his basketball team in scoring and in assists, while not playing as a forward,
but as a guard, because he was always the smallest kid on the court, as he never
grew taller than 5’9”. But the boy almost never misses a damn shot, either! Had
I told stories like that, most of you won’t be reading this far down into this.
Since well, telling you such a story to anyone who doesn’t know Coop, would be
boring to read. So why did I just tell you that and will now close with that?
Well, because you’re gonna stop reading here anyway, that’s why!
Cooper at 5, on our deck. I have so many photos of him as a
preteen, but almost none as a teen.
Jackie, about 10 years ago, at a nearby mountain lake.