Flashback Friday-Gerg

This Flashback Friday is about my awesome, amazing, wonderful stepdad whom I love very much. 

Gerg and the Girls...Ash is a hottie in this picture.  By the way,
when I say that I am the tallest girl in my family of pixies, this is what I mean.
I really and truly am a giant in comparison.  And I am 5'3.

Before I get started, I call Greg "Gerg".  He calls me "Bert" as retaliation.  We like it this way.  I call him GERG because one time, many years ago, he made the mistake of telling me a story.  He was working at a gas station as a teenager and they printed his shirt wrong and he didn't say anything about the mishap.  He rocked it.  It said "GERG" instead of GREG, and he is still rockin' the name every time I say it.  Big mistake to ever tell me anything like that; I will never forget. 

When my brother, my sister and I were little, we used to set up lemonade and art stands outside of our house.  We lived on the Eastside of Milwaukee on Prospect near Downer avenue, where we would walk to Lixx for ice-cream (actually I think it was custard or frozen yogurt) and to what we called "the candy store", which was not a candy store but an old-fashioned pharmacy that sold candy.  My mom never let us have sugar, so we used to earn our own money and haul ass to get some sugar when she wasn't home.  hehe. 

Gerg lived a couple of blocks away for years while we were growing up....of course we never knew that.  One day, he strolled down Prospect and saw these cute little entrepreneurs selling artwork.  They had a clothesline with pictures clipped to it, an easel, a little Fisher Price cash register, the whole shebang.  He bought one of these pictures.  I think it was Ashli's picture and I don't blame him for not buying mine.  Ash and Ty were the artists.  He had the picture hanging on his fridge for years. 

A few years later when I was 13, I went to my mom's friend's annual New Year's Eve party where I hung out by myself on the 4th floor and watched Dick Clark and the ball drop.  (Only the ball dropped, not Dick Clark.  Horrible sentence.)  Greg doesn't drink and he didn't back then either, so when everyone was popping open champagne, he decided to wander up and hang out with the one child at the party.  I remember a nice man coming up to talk to me, but I never knew it was him.  I remember thinking he was pretty cool. 

So fast forward a few years…..Gerg and my mom were introduced to each other by their NYE party friend.  It was then that we started to put the pieces together.  We realized that he had actually met all of us at different stages of our lives, and now he was the man who was making my mom the happiest she had ever been. 

Gerg is the best.  He is smart, witty, and he's one of the most interesting people on the planet.  He has a book collection the size of Rwanda that I will inherit one day because I am the only one who reads like he does.  Back off, Ash and Ty!  Don’t get any ideas!  They're mine!  And some of my favorite times have been laughing hysterically with him.  We are in our own little world sometimes and it's a fun place to be.