The magic afghan

My big brother called last night. The fund-raiser for him and his bitch wife and family netted $4,000. He was so thrilled and happy he had to call and tell me about it. The group that headed the fund-raiser just couldn't get past the afghan being made by our deceased brother, and therefore they gave it to my brother, told him they didn't have the heart to raffle it off.
So - the magic afghan is on his king-sized bed, his cat is sniffing and rolling all over it, and he don't care if the cat snags it or not. So - now, guess it's my mistake to have kept that thing bagged up for so many years, wanting it to keep nice and all that.
Ricky was very important to me, and the disease that took him raged through him like a wildfire, he was in pain all the time and fighting everything that came in contact with him and his non-functioning immune system. Rick was always artistic, he painted and drew and wrote poetry and danced and sang and he was a lot of fun to smoke bong hits with because he'd always made faces and make me laugh. After he went back to Arizona our relationship changed, which happens when one is ill and the other is so far away and unable to understand what's really going on. After all, he always sounded exactly like the same person to me on the phone, and after he died and Brian showed me pictures of the living skeleton that was our brother, I was completely shocked by it. I knew he had AIDS, and I knew from pictures of other people and movies just what the disease did, but WOW what a shock to see it happen to Rick.
Anyway, I was talking about the afghan...Rick was a whiz of a crochetter, he could follow any pattern and never lost patience. The neatest one he did was an Indian Pony-type blanket, white, turquoise, red... Sure you know the style I mean, anyway, the intricacy of the pattern was made worse for him because the yarn was supposed to be cut and drawn in every time the color changed, he decided against that, he just kept all the colors running along and it turned out to be the neatest piece I ever saw. It's hanging on big brothers living room wall from the cane that Rick used during his last days.
When Brian called last night to say that he got the check and the afghan, my first thought was that I should have given him the afghan to begin with, of course it wouldn't have worked out this way as it should have. Brian and I talked for almost an hour and he's happy to have the afghan, he never thought to ask me for it, he said, because he had a lot of stuff from Rick anyway, and thought I wanted to keep that afghan. Yes, I wanted it, I told him, but I didn't want the stupid cats to snag it or hair it up, so I always thought some day I'd have a spare bedroom and the afghan could go on the bed in that spare room and be off limits to the cats... sure.. someday, maybe. Well, enough for now, take care all