memorial day weekend

busy.

friday afternoon:

preschool picnic

saturday morning:

at the fancy trace fork soccer complex

these fields are so nice that i told kris we should donate to getting it paid for, even if it's only five bucks. parking is nice and the playing space for the kids is very nicely demarcated.

saturday afternoon:

vandalia festival at the capitol complex

saturday night:

meeting mr murphdawg at the red carpet lounge

we apparently only went to church on sunday. (not really; mama mowed the lawn, daddy did laundry and the babies cleaned the dining room. nothing to see here.)

today:

hiking at kanawha state forest

boy nearly broke his arm trying to swing outside the cage near the ladder to the corkscrew slide near the picnic area. he was gripping with his right hand on the ladder, had his leg supporting him on the slide and his left arm wedged between the bars on the cage. would've probably been a compound fracture if he'd have lost his grip or slipped. i told him he owed his guardian angel a huge thank you. (seriously. thank you, God.)

on the other hand, we learned we're probably able to handle an overnight camping trip. hope we can fit at least one in this summer.

thanks to the Lord and for the prayers of all those gone before us. i'm going to go ahead and thank you, too, joey. a blessed memorial day to all.

joey's dominoes

one of my favorite catholics, sister janice, always told me that coincidence was God writing anonymously.

stitches

band.

my children love pop music.

the girl has for quite some time.

last year, kris sent a text that she could hear her singing along with adele's "hello" on the radio: "i'm sorry for breaking your toys."

and from a february 2015 text:

'(Baby), what are you singing?' (Baby): 'The Baa Baa Bass song, from the radio. In the car. Baa baa bass, baa baa bass, no trouble.'

she sings a lot to herself, kind of absently when it's quiet and she's alone in the back of the car or playing in her room. 

i'll just hear a tiny voice repeating a chorus or reinterpreting the lyrics to a song using her little girl vocabulary. it's really very sweet. 

while the boy has long enjoyed singing, he never really seemed to have a hit parade like his sister does. 

this weekend, though, i put together a playlist for the two of them to keep the energy up for a massive bedroom cleanup. 

it was based on the "friday funday" lunchbreak music they play at the boy's school in advance of the weekend. 

turns out there's one song he particularly liked and has had me play a lot in the days since.

the thing that's killing me is that i can hear efforts, consciously or unconsciously, to lend conviction and emotion to his little boy voice. (it is, after all, a love song.)

good Lord willing, he'll have a lifetime to learn about love and longing and heartbreak.

there's no way to tell him to enjoy this innocent age, so i guess it will be me to be not so much the guardian as the interested observer of his sweet little heart. 

(hoping it'll be a while before i have to watch him go through that bittersweet time.)

up

i thanked the Lord for nine hours of sleep and a day in which i helped the kids clean both their rooms and washed and folded four and a half loads of laundry. i even wrote a blog post. 

you'd think i could be knocked out for at least six hours. you'd think wrong. fml. 

laundry list

princess pajamas, size 4

years ago, i wrote a post after i'd washed and folded the boy's clothes weeks before he was due to be born.

i held aloft the different sizes of clothes as if i were lifting the little guy under his arms.

this is him at three months. here's him at 24. and look how tiny he'll be as a newborn.

tonight, i folded some clothes that must have been tucked in the recesses of the girl's closet and unearthed, needing a wash before giving them new homes or sent to a consignment shop.

this was the girl at 12 months. how tiny she was. i raised the little dress above my head and imagined a baby looking down at me.

i held up for kris a pair of girls jeans that looked impossibly long. does she fit in these now?

mudder.

kris seemed a bit incredulous. "well ... she is 4."

these people. they keep growing.

i look at the boy and see how lean and angular his face is getting. i look at the girl and see how long and wavy her hair is getting. it seemed to take forever for it to grow.

it was just as a kindly parishioner at church advised me: "the hours are long, but the years are short."

they're so beautiful and so bright. dear Lord, help us to raise them right. continue to watch over, protect and bless them.

gone

joey with the fractal tribe circus.

joey's family let him go this morning.

i'd dreaded the alert from my phone all day. i watched every hour that passed, calculating the time in colorado, wondering when his family would decide to turn off the machines.

when it finally chimed, i let it sit while i completed some inane social media posting. a second alert. it was early afternoon. i didn't want to look. my sister had forwarded a text from joey's sister. he was gone.

i turned off the light to my office, closed the door and wept.

it pretty much hit me all the rest of the day as i would find myself catching my breath after the odd, stray, unguarded thought. pj figured uncle mario really wanted to see his boy.

the baby and i returned after soccer practice to find a bird (a cowbird?) had made its way into the house. i opened a window to set it free. i wondered if joey was just saying hi before taking off.

i'm going to miss this kid. i'm going to miss having him for my children to look up to. if there were anybody to hold up as a role model for study, hard work and cultivating your gifts, it would have been joey.

he'd already made quite an impression on the boy with his kindness and enthusiasm as he told of the weather satellites he helped put into space and his other job as a circus acrobat.

while the boy doesn't entirely grasp the permanence of the tragedy, he did know that he was sad for someone he'd taken a shine to. "i really, really liked him." this, after a three-minute conversation.

i don't know how his mom and his sister are going to be able to stand in another funeral line and greet mourners and well-wishers.

when uncle mario passed, it was the end of a long, slow decline; not only did no one see this coming, no one could have even imagined it.

we are in shock. we are devastated.

angry

because life can be cruel, a nasa scientist lies in critical condition with brain injuries, while the person who rear-ended him while he was stopped at an intersection has been treated and released.

in the careful language of newspapers, police are investigating the driver's impairment as a factor in the late saturday night crash.

i've known joey since he was a baby. he may be the only kid i ever sang to sleep, and that includes my own. while he was always bright, he's managed to apply that creativity and brilliance to a wonderful career as an honest-to-God rocket scientist.

fractal tribe. © jim campbell

(and if that weren't enough, he also exercises his physics as a freakin' acrobat in his own circus. one of the freest thinkers i've ever known, this one.)

that some regular brain was out there who not only injured him (and his girlfriend) as they were stopped at a light makes me angry not only for harm caused by his/her driving but that s/he walks off with nary a scratch.

instead of stewing in my negative thoughts, i'll take a cue from his friends and instead focus on the positive as i pray for him and his girl. Lord, hold them close to your heart. and help me find the grace to forgive.

eulogy from a little boy

the memory jogger.

we went to beckley today. the boy asked if we were going to the wedding he was going to be ring bearer for.

no, i explained, we were going to meet lolo mario's family.

the girl interjected, saying that lolo mario died. i had to explain to her and her brother that he had a disease in his heart and he just got sicker and sicker.

the boy asked if we were going to see him again. i told him probably not in this life. he didn't ask what that meant.

i asked if he remembered who lolo mario was. which one of the many? i showed him this picture. recognition dawned. "oh."

i told him that lolo mario also fixed daddy's broken leg when he was a little boy.

"really?" a pause as the wheels turned.  "have i had his meat?"

um, yes. "meat" apparently being the boy's name for grilled barbecue.

he came up close, his eyes wide and earnest, head nodding for emphasis. "he made good meat."

yes, he did. thus lives one memory of an old family friend from one little boy's perspective.