A Silly Yellow Wristband?

On my right wrist (say that five times fast) I wear a yellow rubber wristband from Lance Armstrong's LIVESTRONG foundation. It's been broken and replaced maybe half a dozen times in the six or seven years I've worn it. I put it there when I learned that a good friend of mine, a guy I consider to be the older brother I never had, had his cancer come back three or four years after his initial treatment for prostate cancer. I said that I would take it off when he was cancer free. While his cancer has yet to metastasize and take over his body and his life, along with severely affecting the lives of his family and those of us who know and love him, it's very much still there. Hence the yellow wristband has remained on my wrist for the last few years.

What exactly do I think that a silly rubber wristband will do to help my friend, or anyone else who is suffering from cancer? It's not as if I started wearing it as some sort of good luck charm. I started wearing it to remind me of someone I care a lot about and the very real possibility that he would leave this life much sooner than anyone wanted him to and that he would go through absolute hell on the way out. I started wearing it to remind myself that I believe in miracles, and that miracles come in infinite forms and sizes. I started wearing it to remind me of how ironic Chris Rock's standup bit about how there isn't any money in a cure for cancer makes me sad that we as a society don't declare an all out war on something that takes the lives of so many people every year - and how such a horrible disease causes those who suffer from it such pain, suffering and money. How it ruins lives of loved ones who see people that mean everything to them suffer. How much money it costs to get treated and how much it doesn't seem to matter how any life that is ended by this awful disease can't be brought back with all the money in the world - yet our insurance companies put a ceiling on dollar amounts that they will shell out for the care of someone. How sad it is that if you're wealthy you can afford better care almost as if you're paying God himself off to lengthen your life or lessen your suffering.

No, this rubber yellow wristband is far from being a good luck charm. Maybe it's there to remind me of the hell that others are going through and to pray for them, to keep believing in miracles. Maybe it's there to remind me that we're all connected as humans and that what happens to any one of us, good or bad, can and does happen to us all - and in the blink of an eye.

No one signs up for cancer. Some people smoke their entire lives and never have lung cancer. Some people never smoke at all and die from lung cancer. Shouldn't we know enough about the factors like genetics by now to be able to stop something like cancer from taking anyone? I've never smoked cigarettes in my life, but I have tended bar at places where people smoked, I lit cigarettes and emptied ashtrays and may well have been the equivalent of a guy who smoked a pack a day or more for a few years. I once lived with a woman who smoked so much that all of my clothes in the walk in closet smelled so much of smoke that every day for a year and a half, someone I worked with would come up to me and ask to bum a smoke. When I told them I didn't smoke, they never believed me - that's how much my clothes stunk. My point? I could very easily be writing about myself or about someone in my family - and the people that are my closest friends are family to me.

Maybe this yellow wristband is there to remind me that there are people I care about who are suffering in ways I can barely fathom - and sometimes I feel guilty about that. And these days there are people added to  the list of lives I know that are being touched by cancer. Maybe you've noticed by now that I am not about to capitalize the word "cancer" - I don't think it deserves it, that's my little writer's mind way of saying "f*** you cancer!...f*** you for every life you've taken and every heart you've hurt with all the terrible things you do to life!"

I wish my list didn't have a single name on it - but it does have names on it, and they are the names of people who have shared my life with me and some have made my life so much better for having played a part in it. Some are people I never had a single word with in school. Some are spouses of dear friends. Some are people I can't even fathom not having in my life. All of the people on the list now are a very favorable part of my life - and I don't want to lose a single one of them, nor do I want anyone else to.

I have a dear friend whose wife is battling cancer. The most important thing this guy does extremely well is to be a great person, one that others would find it impossible to say a bad thing about. Some other things he does extremely well are playing drums and taking photographs. A few months ago he started taking pictures of the journey that he and his wife are going through with cancer and her battle/their battle. I've never met his wife, but I can say without any hesitation whatsoever that if my friend Angelo married her, she's one incredible person. Angelo's photographs are viewable on his website and I'd like to encourage you to go to the website and vote. It only takes a second and you can vote once a day until voting ends on July 29, 2011. Voting just might win them some prize money that my guess would offset medical expenses quite a bit. At the very least voting and looking at what others are going through can build awareness and through such awareness I would hope we would get to a place where something like cancer doesn't stand a chance on any living thing.

So please, take a few seconds to go to my friend's website and vote: http://bopmo.see.me/onelife2011. And please remember to keep good thoughts for anyone who is battling cancer - it could be any one of us at any moment. Thanks! (if the above link doesn't work, please try:  www.angelomerendino.com)

The Mother?

I'm a bit of a foodie - a decent cook, though not a chef. I cook at least as well as any of the women I've dated, probably better than some. My real interest in good food came from The Inn at Turner's Mill. I'd won chili cook-offs before and always been a pretty fair cook, but not until my time at the Mill did I really start to take an interest in really good food.

These days there are loads of places to find both inspiration and information on how to cook anything I'm interested in. I also like to put my own twist on things. Lately I've become very interested in making my own salad dressings. My favorite is balsamic vinaigrette, but I don't want to overdose on that - wonderful as that dressing always tastes to me. I'm lucky that I've worked around some very inspiring chefs - Tom Ward, Sean Monday, Brandt Evans, Alan Ashkinaze, Paul Minnilo and Chris DiLisi. Oh I've watched, I've listened and I've learned.

As one might expect, I keep balsamic vinegar around my kitchen. I thought I knew a thing or two about balsamic vinegar, but I was...well, mistaken. After my workout yesterday, I stopped at the store and bought some stuff to make a healthy lunch of salmon with a salad of baby Romaine & vegetables. It's so easy to make balsamic vinaigrette and since it's been awhile...

Here's where a surprise showed up: I reached for the bottle of balsamic vinegar and started to measure out 1/3 cup for the dressing. That's when I noticed a big fat glob of gooey...stuff in the bottle. Never saw anything like it. It was a bit on the disgusting side, but I tasted the vinegar itself and it tasted perfectly fine. It didn't look like the glob was going to make it out of the bottle so I proceeded to add the rest of my ingredients to the mixer; brown sugar, chopped garlic cloves, dash of sea salt, cracked black pepper, some fresh lemon juice and then I added the oil slowly.

I nailed the dressing perfectly and made a mental note to ask either the chefs or one of the servers I work with about this strange mass in the vinegar bottle. When I got to work the first person I saw was Eric - a guy who has been a chef and got into cooking because he loved dressings. I told him about the strange gooey glob and he calmly smiled and said:

Eric: ah, that's the mother...

Me - thinking: the wha?? mother what??

Me - speaking: The mother

Eric: yeah, the mother - it's what the vinegar starts from. 

Me - thinking: No sh*t. Is he messing with me? Mother huh? Never heard of it.

Me, speaking: How did it get in there? Do I need to throw away the vinegar?

Eric: It was probably in there when you bought it - might have grown a bit, the vinegar is fine...

Me - thinking: Grown a bit?? Will it keep growing and burst into my cupboard leaving a blackish-brown mass and a mess to clean up? Isn't this how The Blob started?

Me, speaking and trying not to appear totally ignorant: Huh, no kiddin' - it was in there when I bought it. Yeah I wondered what the hell it was, I mean I tasted the vinegar and it seemed fine, so of course (mock confident tone here) I figured there was no problem and I didn't panic....

Eric: yup, it's fine.

Me: cool.

Mind you I believed him, hard as it was to wrap my mind around this "mother" - and in the back of my mind I wondered why I've never heard anything about this, but no matter. I did kind of want to get the other guys in the kitchen to give me their take on it, but somehow I knew even without asking anyone that it was alright and nothing to worry about. If you have balsamic vinegar in your kitchen, you might take a look and see if your mother is in there - because if you've never seen your mother, I can assure you it's a bit of a shock when you first meet up. That is all.