Fighting the fight, a hank of yarn at a time...

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Anything that bought Mary another day was good...

Going down in a not so great section of El Paso, near the river to buy yarn  caused  some
small problems......The main one was cultural.......In the Hispanic Culture men would not be
caught dead  in a yarn shop buying yarn.   Much less, a man who knows the differences in
lot numbers,   plys of yarn, and  yarn blends.......

Yet,   Mary was fighting for her life, and
anything I had to do to improve  her quality of life, or make the struggle easier I was going
to do.......Okay, so it meant learning a lot of things.    Like?     Well, yarn called "Sports-Yarn"
has some cotton mixed in with the wool,  and there are baby yarns that may be 2 ply or 3
ply and regular yarn is 4 ply.   Oh it is a whole different world!

Well, the Mexican ladies down in this emporium of wool often sold 35 pound hunks of
yarn  for $10.   If I had been forced to buy the stuff at a regular shop.....Like Hancock
Fabrics, my customers couldn't afford it.....Then they wouldn't sit around and chat with
Mary, and she would start to brood about the horrors of the Chemotherapy.....In short,
if I had to let those clerks in the yarn shop think think I was a humpbacked whale, well
and good........Anything that would buy my ailing wife a little time and a little hope would be
done.

She had lost both breasts and 29 lymph nodes to the cancer, and the Chemo had taken
her hair, or maybe it was the Radiation Therapy, at this point, whichever one was the culprit
is irrelevent.....I've heard it argued both ways.

So, if these little Mexican ladies thought I was gay,

so be it!  I got tired of trying to tell
them  "Mary No es mi madre, es mi esposa."    It got to the point where I didn't care if
they thought the moon was made of green cheese!    I only saw them twice a month.

Why, I even developed a set of mannerisms especially for yarn buying....Laying two
fingers alongside my cheek  and pursing my lips while inspecting the yarn....Patting my
foot,  and waving my hand and telling them that their new Alpacca yarn was simply
scrumptious.

Acting?   Yea, You betcha!    There ain't nothing wrong with my  biological drives,
but, if nothing you say can change their minds,  why not enjoy making fools of them.

Okay, so maybe it was a little cruel,  Know what?    I'd do it again.......Anything that
bought Mary another day was good.......In the long run, it's not vastly different than
the Used Car Salesman's  spiel when he's trying to sell you a "clunker".........

Now Mary had some objections.....Not to my acting, but from the fact that the ladies
thought she was my mother......She was having some problems with her "self-image"
right then......and  her feminity was  taking a beating in her own mind.

In the end,  we lost the fight.......but we won the first 4 rounds with Cancer, and I bought
her 15 years using every strategy  I could think of.......On the whole of it, that statement
sounds concieted as all get out.........She won the fight....It was her victory, not mine.
All I did was to help, and sometimes "Helping" meant just having a shoulder for her
to cry on.........

In life, dear readers, you fight the fight, every moment, every hour, and every day.
There is time to wonder how in the world you managed everything ,when the fight is over.