Neighbors

When a human being passes away, friends, family, and the casual acquaintance should attempt to say something nice about their time among us. Even if there's not all that much nice to say. It's the decent thing to do.

But in the event that someone passes prematurely from a god awful disease, leaving behind an immeasurable impression upon the world, well then, we should line-up and take our turn describing the awesomeness that we will no longer have the opportunity to witness.

My friend Jennifer Birch passed away last weekend. And this is my turn.

A case for becoming a Padres fan

 I often look through photo albums of me as a child and I can’t help but laugh. I’m not laughing at the terrible hairstyles my mom allowed me to have (each funny in their own right) but instead, the odd selection of clothing. I see a lot of sports clothing with a variety of teams represented. There’s the mandatory Bears, Cubs, and White Sox gear from my original home in Chicago, Illinois. But the weird things I see are the unusual teams like the Oilers, Cowboys, and Eagles. Steelers. Red Sox. Yankees. Yankees?!!! What was my dad thinking to allow such flip-flopping between sports teams? I guess he was just letting me be a kid.

 Now that I have daughters I’m doing things a little differently. When it comes to sports apparel I buy only Padres (or Chargers) related items and they agree to wear them. We wear clothing and hats emblazoned with the letters “SD” and the name Padres. We wear the stuff that lets people know that we live in one of the best cities in the country.

Reborn

We celebrated my dad's 66th birthday on December 27th. That was five days ago. It was kind of a big deal. Not because he turned 66 but because he had died 27 days earlier.

My dad was born on December 27th, 1947 in Illinois. That very same year Frank Capra released It's a Wonderful Life, a film which became a family viewing tradition each year around Christmas in our home. My lasting takeaway from Capra's film remains that we are all important to someone. My dad is important to so many.

September 11th and a Pizza

Americans of a certain age can reflect on the events of September 11th, 2001 and tell you precisely what they were doing during those morning hours. It is a defining moment for those of my generation. We have no Pearl Harbor. No grassy knoll. No man on the moon. We have 9/11. I can faintly recall the day President Regan was shot. Aside from hearing my mom cry, there's nothing particularly searing about that moment. I was young. And Regan lived. September 11th is different.

People were transfixed by indelible images of people staggering across the Brooklyn Bridge to flee the ruins of mangled steel left behind on the island of Manhattan.

By late afternoon the world bore witness to tender moments of family members posting flyers for loved ones who they would never see again. I too had felt an indescribable closeness to these people who struggled some three thousand miles away. While filled with empathy I could not help but think about myself.

Constructing memories

We'll sit together, the daughters and I, playing card games. We mostly play Uno. I've taught them how to talk trash. Respectfully of course. And while laughing and gently prodding each other, I will use references from The League: "It's your turn! Hurry up and go, Chalupa Batman!"

Earlier in the week I learned that a former student had been killed. It had been so long since I heard his name or thought about him that I couldn't be sure if he even passed through my classroom.

The gift of your presence

I think it was roughly a week after the shootings at Sandy Hook that the NRA's head, Wayne LaPierre, finally stepped forward and made a statement regarding the tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut. LaPierre called for an armed guard at every school.

I spent that week watching CNN's vignettes of the young children killed. I mostly cried. Then I wrote this  . . .

Kindergarten essay

After the shooting took place in Newtown, Connecticut I felt compelled to say something and I used Twitter as the vehicle to do so. I wrote it in a stream of consciousness guided only by the thoughts of my daughter who is in Kindergarten - the grade level initially reported for nearly all of the children killed at Sandy Hook.

Stream of consciousness coupled with Twitter's character limits provides obvious challenges to what you are trying to convey as a writer. Twitter can be weird with archiving old content so I thought I would preserve it by importing it to this site. I also wanted to revisit some of the idea in what was described as an essay by some.