Saturday Night, February 20th- Zio's Cards

I do not know if I showed you these cards or not. I made them for my Zio (Uncle) Corrado. They are somewhere sitting in a box in Italy right now and the box has not been delivered. I am not sure he will even ever see these cards.

This morning he had an epiletic crisis.... he is in ICU now. His brain cancer tumors did get smaller thanks to the radiation, but the cancer has spread to all his organs but his heart. His time on Earth is very short now.

He is beloved by many nieces and nephews. It is a shame he never had children of his own, because he would of been a great father. I am so sorry that my time with him was very short. I had 8 months at the beginning of my life with him. Then I did not get to see him again until July 2008, and I lived with him at Marina di Pisa, Italy for 3 weeks. He was supposed to spend Christmas 2009 with me here in Arkansas. But the illness struck in November and his plans had to change. As most of you know, I went there for Christmas and started this blog to record my travels. So I got the additional 2 more weeks.

I often wonder how he could of stolen my heart in 5 weeks. Although I met my other aunt and uncles too, he is the one I refer to as the Beloved Uncle and the Uncle of my Heart. I call him many names... Zio Diablo Qua Qua (Devil Duck) since many of the cousins call him Qua Qua for the duck sounds he makes to babies... he calls me Diavolina (Devil) Arlene or Angelica (Angel) Arlene and sometimes Regina (Queen) Arlene. What a great cook he is too! I love his spaghetti carabone (I probably misspelled that).

He even scrapbooks! Well he scrapbooks only photos of naval vessels and aerial (planes). He has a separate book for each. It is his hobby. I use photographs of families and he does the boats and the planes. That will explain more about why I made him the boat card. He has a big fat cat (think Garfield on red meat and not lasanga!) so I made a cat card. He was telling me in December to plan on returning to him in June, once he got the "frogs" (his term for the tumors) out of his head. Thus a frog card. Finally, I see him as a playful monkey... so a monkey card was appropriate.

We carried on a many a conversation in broken Italian on my side, broken English on his side, and lots of gestures and drawings. Oh how he makes me laugh and then makes me cry. He is so funny with the biggest personality you could ever imagine. And he loves to hand me something special and watch me cry over it.... Once it was a set of small expresso cups and matching saucers and he knew I do not drink coffee. It was a set of his late wife's. He wanted me to have it. I want to get it put into a shadow box to hang on my wall. At Christmas he gave me 3 beautiful items: a leather purse, a pair of gorgeous earrings and my most treasured is a jewlery box with a plaque in it... the plaque was to commemorate his trip to the USA. I cried buckets of tears when I read the final 4 words, With Love Zio Corrado.

Tomorrow I will try to finish a layout of the two of us I started on Thursday.

If you can, please say a prayer for our Beloved Zio. Just pray he goes quietly without pain. He will be sorely missed by those of us who love him. The most important thing I can say is that he is a good man, who knows Love and gives Love.

Goodnight,
Arlene