Sparkly Rainbows For Real

So I promised sparkly rainbows and ill-advised tattoos, no more ranting about medical conspiracies, the Malibu Jesus Complex (“I shall Heal Thee With Mine Awesomeness”), or how there are so few things in food /medical life that are 100% true for everyone (such as...carboplatin/vincristine is a gold standard of medicine for many low grade glioma kids. Just not mine, which is what it is.  Or... I can pass on bread, my BMI is normal in spite of myself—ie through zero goodness on my part, it just happens, it is a blessing for which I am grateful-- but don’t touch my chocolate. I am wickedly and unrepentantly addicted to chocolate).  Life is variable.

So I make this rash promise to Behave Myself, and then I go on vacation, which was lovely…and I found myself really having a hard time putting behave myself words on paper. I forgot to bring my Cadbury, maybe that was the problem…mini-egg withdrawal?

But I did actually have a sparkly rainbow moment a few weeks ago, a for real literal sparkly rainbow moment.

My second born is a compulsive mail-getter. The mailman or mail lady or whoever is on for the day always knows G, she waits at the end of our driveway if she sees the truck coming, she checks the box a few times each afternoon to make sure SHE is the one to bring stuff into the house. This might date back to the Hat Hunt of 2006, when G was losing a lot of hair fast and through the efforts of my sister Who Makes Things Happen, hats started arriving in the mail every day, buckets and buckets of hats, she received 150 hats by the time the hunt wound down. We had post office bins coming out the wazoo, and hats of all kinds…

She LOVES to see if anything is in the mail for her.

(Yes, we STILL sing the Blues Clues Mail Song. I probably will until I am 90.

I kind of hope I do, that will make my great grandchildren Berserk. heheheh.)

(I should take a moment here to give a shout out to Miss Connie, an online friend who has sent G letters and cards nearly every single week for the last several years. Yes. Years. Much love to you, Miss Connie from Louisiana. You may never know how much this means to G).

So G dragged in a pile of mail, and there was a letter for me. An actual letter for me, not a “letter”, you know, the ones that come with your name “written” on the front, and on the inside it’s just a charitable request or an ad for rug cleaning. My sister (the One Who Makes Things Happen…well, the first one like that, all of my sisters have followed her Mover and Shaker path) had sent me a letter.

Inside the envelope: a package of sparkly rainbow stickers, little metallic rainbows in varying sizes, and a note about the joy of rainbow stickers and how I didn’t have to share.

I had a feeling not unlike the Grinch when his heart grew three sizes.

Like this, but with glasses.

Rewind to 1983. Sticker collecting was EVERYTHING. My sister and I would save our pennies and go to Sweet Samantha’s and spend inordinately long periods of time agonizing over which Lisa Frank stickers to choose. At 25 cents a pop, you had to budget. We organized our stickers into smellies, fuzzies, sparklies, tiny tots, animals, Wacky Packages, unicorns, rainbows…stickers were a source of great joy. We would trade them in scenes straight from the floor of the stock exchange. Stickers were Serious Business.

this would have been the Mother Lode for us...holy Toledo...

we would have had to babysit for YEARS to have this many Lisa Frank stickers.

I only JUST found my old sticker book and finally emptied it, apparently 30 year old stickers kind of lose their stick…but a lot of them I did save, including all the sparkly rainbows…those were a prize…

So in that moment, opening that envelope, in the middle of a chemo week, as I was barely holding any kind of normal together, I had 8 glorious sheets of rainbow stickers ALL FOR ME.

This made me so happy, and loved, and just yay. My sister knows me best.

I stuck 2 on the hospital binder…which, after all that angst, I realized is just too unwieldy to carry to clinic every time if I also have to carry a large purse/tote, so I use it as a mobile file and carry a multi-pocket folder on regular visits… the rest are still there, waiting to be stuck in any place that I can think of that needs a sparkly rainbow.

Really, what place DOESN'T need a sparkly rainbow?

I’m not even sure if it was the stickers that made me happy, or my sister’s thoughtfulness, or both. I was just so tickled by those stickers. So here’s my sparkly rainbow question for all of you: Do you have any blast from the past kind of thing that just makes you feel warm and fuzzy and nice? You know, a song, a smell, an object, anything that just brings you back to a happy time, or at least a happy moment in time?

Maybe if you tell me, I’ll share a sparkly rainbow with you. I just finished off the Cadbury eggs while typing this, so…yeah. I only have stickers to share. : )