Had my four year checkup yesterday: no cancer return!

[marble falls]

77. When I was 14 or so I worked as a mason's laboror for my dad's construction company summers ...

... he had a bricklayer - Turk Turkovitch. Turk was the youngest son of a Ukrainian family and he was single and the designated caretaker of his aging mother, he lived in the basement and it was understood he would inherit the house when his mother passed. His life was laying brick, drinking beer at the High-Lite tavern listening to C&W and taking care of 'mom'.

We used to pick him up and got to the job site, usually in Cleveland (we lived in Akron). One morning we picked up Turk and he was in pressed bluejeans and flannel shirt, his Sunday work boots. He had a grocery bag folded like a big lunch bag. When he got in the pickup, I moved over and nobody said hello or made the usual jokes. We didn't stop in the town where the job was and we drove into Cleveland to the East Side where Wade Park VA Center was (it's now the Carl B. Stokes VA Medical center), went around to the circle leading up to the front door, stopped and Turk got out with a "see ya" to and from my dad. I figured when he pulled away my dad would park and we'd wait for Turk. When we drove off the Center and got into traffic, I asked my dad if we weren't going to wait and he said "no," I asked how Turk was going to get home, and my dad said "Turk isn't coming home."

And I understood then: VA was were you went to die when you had nowhere else to go.

That was my introduction to VA and everything I learned at Brecksville only carved it all in stone.

I don't know if you're familiar with the underground cartoonist Harvey Pekar, but Wade Park VA was where he had his day gig for years.