First Cancer

In 1995 Marilyn was diagnosed with colorectal cancer with the real fear that she would have to have a colostomy bag. This ended up not being needed as the tumor was just about one inch in diameter and the small amount of colon removed allowed reattachment to the rectom. Unfortunately the tumor was right next to and had spread to a lymph node and a full course of chemo and radiation therapies were advised and done. We believe that the radiation therapy strongly contributed to her second cancer, uterine, ten years later.

This is a poem I wrote when I learned of her concerns prior to her surgery.

That you were afraid I wouldn't love you any more
I'm afraid just floored me--struck me to the core.
In a way, this way, it can be said and true:
"I already love you so much, no more can I do."

But who or what is this "you" that I love in "I love you?"
What are "you" composed of? Are "you" one thing through and through?
I've never stopped to think if I love an essence or a whole,
Or whether there are parts I don't love or taken a loving poll.

Yes, I love your body, the texture of your skin.
I love your sultry voice and laugh. Your smile does me in.
I can't imagine loving "you" less for loving all this stuff.
Even if some parts came missing, "you" would be enough.

It's not your mind or money, because I love "you" anyway.
Even when your mind's made up, or from my decision you stray...
Hell, not mine alone but your own you've revisited once or twice.
I love "you" though you agonize and include me in the vise.

It's only true for magnets that opposites attract.
"You" and I, we complement--face the world back to back.
And that's the "you" that I love. There isn't a surer path.
The "you" that is all of "you," and more, is my better half.

You are so much a part of me that we must be closer than siamese twins. We've grown so close that we more often than not crave the same foods. We are the proverbial "joined at the hip, ... the heart, and head." It's not necessarily that "great minds think alike," it's just great that our minds think so much alike.

And, I love you!

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Marilyn lost her life to cancer but was able to truly "live" until the very end due to a lymphedema garment from Don Kellogg, inventor and founder of Telesto-Medtech. It is due to the "living" he provided Marilyn and through his suggestion and connection with Saskia Thiadens of the National Lymphedema Network that the Marilyn Westbrook Garment Fund exists. It needs other people's help to remain a living memorial of Marilyn. Please help other people receive the gift of living by donating to the Marilyn Westbrook Garment Fund. Thank you.

Marilyn Reads Michener

I found out the hard way that Marilyn liked reading in depth historical fiction with her favorite author being James Michener. Since I like to read so much I didn’t think anything more about her reading other than noticing and being glad that she also liked to read.

There were two instances that brought the differences in what we liked to read clearly to my attention. In the first one, I was a very supportive and participative guinea pig...

We were in Houston and because of the heat and humidity drinking a lot of ice tea. She had just finished reading Centennial, the story of Colorado from the raising of the Rockies to at least its centennial, or the U.S.’ Centennial, or… (I never read it so really don’t know the full story.) Anyway, the book had quite a list of teas that the Chinese workers building the Transcontinental Railroad used and she decided we should try every one of them. Some of them were hard to get but we managed. The one both of us agreed was not to our taste was Lapsang Souchong. It had a smokier coffee-like flavor that wasn’t as good as coffee, not that either of us drank coffee. (Although she did have a Melitta coffee strainer and we have had at least two other coffee makers. I believe it was and still is used mostly for parental visits.)

The second incident occurred much later when our whole family was snowbound in a rental house in Arnold. A local trip to a movie rental store was fine but our intended drive up to Bear Valley was cancelled. This time the book was Texas and the only movie she deemed suitable for children in the whole store that she also wanted to see happened to be the movie made from the book. I still don’t know how closely the movie “Texas” followed the book because none of us watched it through. Now though, none of her children would be able to be enticed to read Michener.

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Marilyn lost her life to cancer but was able to truly "live" until the very end due to a lymphedema garment from Don Kellogg, inventor and founder of Telesto-Medtech. It is due to the "living" he provided Marilyn and through his suggestion and connection with Saskia Thiadens of the National Lymphedema Network that the Marilyn Westbrook Garment Fund exists. It needs other people's help to remain a living memorial of Marilyn. Please help other people receive the gift of living by donating to the Marilyn Westbrook Garment Fund. Thank you.

Seeing Texas: San Antonio

While traveling to San Antonio was a distant second to Mustang Island, we did go there three or four times. Our first time involved camping in a park close to the city, again Friday and Saturday night.

The camping was memorable for two reasons: There weren’t that many campers, the moon was full, and there I was carrying Marilyn piggyback on the park road singing “the moon at night is big and bright, deep in the heart of Texas.” I think I may have injured my knees but I certainly didn’t notice it then. The second memorable camping experience on that trip was the late night arrival of at least two motorcycles, loud motorcycles. They were gone by the time we were up the next morning and both of us commented on the likelihood that they hadn’t paid their camping fee.

Still, our first tour of San Antonio involved Marilyn wanting to see all the missions in and around San Antonio. Unlike the Alamo, most of the others were still active churches. One in particular appeared to be closed but my wife wanted to see it so I tried the gate and it was unlocked. We saw the mission. She later confided that she wouldn’t have been so bold but I didn’t see it as bold at all. I felt that if I hadn’t “opened the door for her,” so to speak, she would have done it herself. I wasn’t being bold so much as chivalrous.

Every time we went to San Antonio, we walked the Riverwalk. I think it was this first time that we went to a relatively fancy Mexican restaurant just off of the Riverwalk and enjoyed not only the food but a roving Mariachi Band.

One of our other trips to San Antonio was to show her parents another place in Texas. We camped at the same park and this time our night was interrupted by some woman in a nearby tent shouting: “No! No! No! Yeesss!” Marilyn didn’t take the hint, her parents were in the next tent.

Another of our trips was to visit her sister and brother-in-law. Kroger had moved them for him to take on the management of one of their stores or district in their expansion into Texas. They showed us another great time on the Riverwalk and at some bars/cafes directly on it.

In all of our trips there, we never did ride on the boats that plied the river. Like most other places, Marilyn preferred walking. Most of our trips included stopping by the Alamo. Every time we stopped, we learned something more but the inside was too “touristy.” We much preferred the grounds outside and the juxtaposition of the city buildings with a spot that was reminiscent of a much emptier space. Plus, when I was younger, I always pictured the walls as much higher. Even the sections that hadn’t been reduced to the point that horses could easily jump over weren’t that high.

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Marilyn lost her life to cancer but was able to truly "live" until the very end due to a lymphedema garment from Don Kellogg, inventor and founder of Telesto-Medtech. It is due to the "living" he provided Marilyn and through his suggestion and connection with Saskia Thiadens of the National Lymphedema Network that the Marilyn Westbrook Garment Fund exists. It needs other people's help to remain a living memorial of Marilyn. Please help other people receive the gift of living by donating to the Marilyn Westbrook Garment Fund. Thank you.

Seeing Texas: Mustang (and Padre) Island

I don’t really remember just when our first trip to Padre Island occurred, but we were on one of our seeing Texas road trips with my parents and sisters. We had gone west to San Antonio, Austin, and had even taken a longer trip south, on our own, so Marilyn the Tour Guide took the opportunity of showing my family a place that we hadn't seen. It was the first time we truly went to Corpus Christi, which wasn’t that impressive to us at the time, but then we also went to Padre Island, which was. Since we couldn’t drive very far on Padre Island, we ended up driving north onto and through Mustang Island.

I think it was the ferry at the north end of Mustang Island that really got us hooked but the plentiful and available car camping was at least part of the bait. We ended up going back to Mustang Island frequently that first year, even and especially in the remaining summer months. While humid, the breezes off of the gulf kept it from being unbearably hot, even in Marilyn’s two-person tent, which was much better, cooler than my larger canvas one and a whole lot easier to set up.

We got our camping on Mustang Island down to a science. Friday, shortly after I would come home from work, the 280Z would be loaded, packed with food, clothes, and cooking equipment inside and the tent and sleeping bag in a big canvas duffel bag outside on a bike rack. The Z looked a lot like it had a backpack on. I bet we carried that duffel more often than we carried our bicycles.

We typically ate sandwiches on the road as our dinner so we could get there sooner. Every once in a while for Friday dinner, but always at least once a weekend, we would buy a lot of cheap shrimp from some vendor and boil them up. I got quite skilled at pinching heads and we didn’t bother to butterfly them. With the seasonings that Marilyn carried with her just for this purpose, they always tasted good. What’s more, we didn’t have any refrigeration so we just had to eat them all, even if the mosquitoes drove us inside to do so. Like everything else is reputed to be, they were big in Texas, which made our tent’s screens all that more effective and they had to be after dark.

We were typically inside the tent after dark because of the mosquitoes. We had an electric lantern we would turn on and our first ritual was to find and kill all the mosquitoes that came in with us. We then would play cards, either two-handed bridge, which was really just to practice bidding, or Marilyn’s favorite, Spades. I don’t know when we learned and started playing cribbage but we didn’t play any cribbage on Mustang Island.

We only aborted the trip one time, when I didn’t pack the tent. Normally all the duffel bag stuff was already in the duffel bag and ready to go. While I had done the drying procedure before and successfully put the tent back in the duffel bag, this time I hadn’t. Maybe it was particularly wet or something distracted me. (Yeah, I should blame it on Marilyn because she was a most pleasant distraction.) The only real problem was how far we had driven before I remembered that we didn’t have a tent with us. If it had been any less distance, we could have made a quick return and still made Mustang Island. As it was, we were too tired upon our return to do anything but sleep. I think it was missing out on the shrimp that was the worst of it.

There were a couple of trips during bug season that came close to being aborted. One in particular we had to stop three times to clean the windshield. The windshield washer fluid and wipers were just not doing the trick and the resulting paste that was spread over the windshield may have been translucent, but it was far from transparent.

While we waded in the Gulf waters often, we never swam. One time our wading didn’t last long because of the spawning crabs. Now crabs typically didn’t bother anyone unless provoked but how were we to avoid provoking them when there were thousands, at least hundreds of them underfoot. It lasted as long as it did because we didn’t know what was going on. Then we noticed the people illegally catching them. You aren’t supposed to catch females with eggs.

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Marilyn lost her life to cancer but was able to truly "live" until the very end due to a lymphedema garment from Don Kellogg, inventor and founder of Telesto-Medtech. It is due to the "living" he provided Marilyn and through his suggestion and connection with Saskia Thiadens of the National Lymphedema Network that the Marilyn Westbrook Garment Fund exists. It needs other people's help to remain a living memorial of Marilyn. Please help other people receive the gift of living by donating to the Marilyn Westbrook Garment Fund. Thank you.

Tree Golf

While I was working for Amdahl Corporation in Houston, there were a couple of hardware engineers who played a lot of golf. I never played regular golf with them so don’t really know how well they played but Marilyn and I did play tree golf with them in a company sponsored outing they organized.

Tree golf was supposedly their brilliant idea after one of their less than successful rounds of regular golf where they kept hitting their balls out of bounds into the trees. Their thought was that if they were going to be hitting their balls into trees, they might as well play where that was the purpose.

Tree golf’s rules were simple. In a section of woods, nine trees were marked one through nine. Each player was allowed to choose one club from their regular golf bag but that then became the only “stick” they could use for the whole game. The object was to hit each tree in order, counting the number of strokes.

In tree golf typically a lot of beer was consumed, which if truth be known is how I suspect the round of regular golf became the inspiration for tree golf. I don’t know how much beer Marilyn consumed but it may not have been that much because she couldn’t have taken that many sips and swing her stick as much as she did.

Yes, she won the duffer trophy. She was quite proud of it because she had worked so hard for it. I would have put it down to just being a good sport, which she was, but she kept that trophy around until we moved out of Houston. I can’t remember all of its adornment but I do remember the twigs that represented trees, the empty beer can, and a badly sliced golf ball, which would have been unusable anyway with the mounting nail through it.

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Marilyn lost her life to cancer but was able to truly "live" until the very end due to a lymphedema garment from Don Kellogg, inventor and founder of Telesto-Medtech. It is due to the "living" he provided Marilyn and through his suggestion and connection with Saskia Thiadens of the National Lymphedema Network that the Marilyn Westbrook Garment Fund exists. It needs other people's help to remain a living memorial of Marilyn. Please help other people receive the gift of living by donating to the Marilyn Westbrook Garment Fund. Thank you.

The Family Initiation

I don’t know how we are going to continue this and certainly don’t want to accidentally kill it by publishing it. But, my family initiation was done at my father’s parents’ house, as was my mother's over 50 years ago. Marilyn’s was done at my parents’ house, as was all of our children’s. As this story is about Marilyn, the story of her initiation needs to be included. And, at least for three of the five events, I have pictures. (But maybe my memory is faulty. I can only remember four things.)

It is important that the initiatee be either new to the family or at a rite of passage age. The new to the family person is more likely to go along, not wanting to offend. The rite of passage person is at least lighter but is also more likely to remember the initiation with fondness but the key is to remember the joining. And, most importantly, it’s fun, at least for the initiators and observers. A certain amount of gullibility is also a big help.

In Riding the Airplane, the victim (I mean the initiatee.) is blind folded and asked to step onto a table leaf, or board on bricks. Then two muscular assistants lift the table leaf and move it around, mostly in place. A third person hints that the “airplane rider” is hitting the ceiling with a heavy book and the rider is asked to jump. Even the skeptics hesitate because it does feel like you are higher than the three or so inches you really are off the ground. This is accentuated by a fourth person whose shoulder provides a convenient balance. This person squats as the board is moved around giving further evidence that the “airplane” is truly way off the ground.


Then there is the magic trick of Pinning a Cup of Water to the Wall, which the initiate will be able to do themselves once they are shown how. Somehow the person demonstrating the way to do it, in this case me because no one wanted to get the blame if it was taken badly, drops the pin. The person learning the trick usually is quite helpful and immediately bends to pick it up, after all I still had a full cup of water. It wasn’t full long and the person learning the trick was wet.

Threading a needle with one eye will be covered in a separate topic.

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Marilyn lost her life to cancer but was able to truly "live" until the very end due to a lymphedema garment from Don Kellogg, inventor and founder of Telesto-Medtech. It is due to the "living" he provided Marilyn and through his suggestion and connection with Saskia Thiadens of the National Lymphedema Network that the Marilyn Westbrook Garment Fund exists. It needs other people's help to remain a living memorial of Marilyn. Please help other people receive the gift of living by donating to the Marilyn Westbrook Garment Fund. Thank you.

Happy stressed home ownership

While the monthly mortgage payment wasn't that much more than our then current rent, it was quite a commitment. (ARMs are nice that way.) It meant we were committed to Houston. It was a larger money liability than either of us had ever signed up for. And, although we didn't realize it at the time, it was a commitment to quite a bit of work. But from the following, we should have had a clue.

After we were "committed," it was fully ours but we hadn't moved in and hadn't yet arranged for any utilities, i.e., no heat, Houston had a freeze. The water wasn't shut off during the transfer. There were spectacular ice sculptures all over the city from the frozen spray of water from the broken water mains. One of the more remarkable of them, at least in size, was just across the street from our then apartment complex.

Marilyn was always attuned to the weather and would actually listen to the reports on the radio and TV. I have always tended to tune them out like commercials. So at her insistance, after dark with the temperature falling, by flashlight since there was also no electricity, I was wrapping the pipe that fed the water into the house with Marilyn holding a flashlight so I could see what I was doing. We then turned on a couple faucets in dribble mode to keep the water flowing. We didn't figure they would notice our little wasting of water with all the mains spewing it for no purpose around the city. Besides, while the water wasn't shut off, I don't know whether or not the account had been transferred yet. Our worst nightmare was that a pipe would burst in the attic and ruin both the ceiling and floor of the affected room and running water is supposed to be more resistant to freezing.

After making sure that our new house didn't wash away from pipes bursting, we had to clean, well, wash. Eventually we would replace all of the carpet and paint all of the walls, except for the walls with the mirrored glass tiles and the paneling in the family room, but for the two of us moving in, all we did was vacuum and wash. We also rented one of those "steam" cleaners for the carpet that was every where because vacuuming alone wouldn't have made the place livable. The previous owner was a chain smoker, which might have played a role in her demise. The house reeked. I don't remember the color of the steam cleaning water but I do remember the brownish yellow runoff and worse looking rinse water as we literally Formula 409'd every square inch of the walls and bathrooms.

Part of the do it yourself steam cleaning was to vacuum the floors thoroughly. It had red shag in the family room, kitchen and the bedroom off of the kitchen. Our vacuum cleaner wasn't powerful enough to suck up coins so I had to stop vacuuming frequently to find what was causing the rattle.

It was a lot of work to move into that house on the cheap but the purchase was truly a happy event. Now that we had a house, we could start working on a family. We did so with enthusiasm, no more Catholic approved birth control, after we first rested a bit.

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Marilyn lost her life to cancer but was able to truly "live" until the very end due to a lymphedema garment from Don Kellogg, inventor and founder of Telesto-Medtech. It is due to the "living" he provided Marilyn and through his suggestion and connection with Saskia Thiadens of the National Lymphedema Network that the Marilyn Westbrook Garment Fund exists. It needs other people's help to remain a living memorial of Marilyn. Please help other people receive the gift of living by donating to the Marilyn Westbrook Garment Fund. Thank you.