Happy Strawberry Shortcake and Nothing Else Day!

 

Don't worry if it snuck up on you. As a movable feast, it tends to do that. The good news is, you can celebrate Strawberry Shortcake and Nothing Else Day any time it gets too hot to cook or strawberries are on sale for cheap. I actually ended up making these because I got a Too Good to Go bag that included some pre-made shortcakes, so all I had to do was prep the berries and add some whipped cream. Super simple and delicious!

I'll always miss my mom. This is one of the small reasons why -- she chose to do a few spur-of-the-moment things that became regular occurrences every year. (Including making nothing but strawberry shortcake for dinner on a summer night when it was just too hot to cook.)

This is just to say...

 Bob Pardo died today. He was 89 years old.

Staycations and epiphanies

"Time for a staycation!" said the bearded shopper behind me.

I turned. "Sorry?"

"We were planning to go off somewhere this weekend, but now we're just going to have a little staycation instead," he said convivially, looking over the beef jerky. "Getting all kinds of goodies for the family." He surveyed his cart. "Actually, there's almost no junk food in here," he added. "They're gonna be disappointed."

After we exchanged a few pleasantries about needing to have flexible plans these days, I wished him a happy staycation and continued looking for salad fixings. (Tonight I'm making ham and beans and a big green salad with goodies in it.) And as I was looking through the canned beans, a sudden memory swept over me.

The word "staycation" has been around longer than I thought -- Merriam-Webster says it was first coined in 1944 -- but it really took hold in American popular culture during the early days of the pandemic. But the concept of staying in while doing something different certainly isn't new. And the memory I had was an amalgam of several different memories, something my mom would do occasionally when I was growing up, especially my years in middle school.

"Tonight, let's see what it was like to live in colonial times," she'd say. And for that evening, we'd turn off all the lights, unplug the appliances and clocks (except the battery-powered ones), and turn off the ringer on the phone. Instead of cooking on the stove, Mom would fire up the kerosene heater in front of the fireplace and cook a bubbling stew on its flat, trapezoidal top. We'd light kerosene lanterns at the kitchen table and put candles above the fireplace, and we'd do our homework by lantern light while Mom, who had been a history teacher before she married and had six children, would tell us about the era before video games and electrical power and refrigerators and lightbulbs: how people in those days lit their homes and kept their food safe to eat, how they'd cook over the kitchen hearth and bake in earthen ovens, how they'd entertain themselves in the long, cold winters. Sometimes during these colonial-times evenings, we'd get our sleeping bags and all sleep together in the front room, cozy and safe in the residual warmth of the kerosene heater.

"Lantern" by Chuck Grimmett. Public domain image.

I was smiling a little at the thought of it -- and then, for the first time, it really hit me.

"Oh," I said aloud, right in the canned-food aisle. "She didn't have enough money to pay PG&E."

We lived well below the poverty line even before my dad died, and while I think we kids all knew there wasn't much money, my mother tended to focus on things that were freely available to us -- the library, the public parks, city museums, walks and hikes in local green spaces, imaginative play -- rather than things we couldn't afford. There must have been times when she had very little money to pay the gas and electric bill, but she'd done such a skillful job of making "colonial times" into a purposeful adventure that up to that moment, it had never occurred to me that she was doing it out of financial necessity.

"She made necessity into an adventure." If I had to sum up my mom's parenting style in six words, I think that would be it.

Live a little

The other day I was out and about, shopping for sundries (as you do). It was a pleasant late spring day in the Puget Sound region -- that is to say, cold, grey and drizzly -- but I was Getting Stuff Done, so it was all good.

And then I came across this, and it pulled me up short.

It's just a bag of soft black licorice candies shaped like Scottie dogs. You can find them at lots of drugstores across the United States. No big thing.

But.

I first found a bag of these Scotties at the end of 2019, and thinking they were kind of cute, I bought them as a stocking stuffer for my mom for Christmas. I knew Mom loved all kinds of black licorice, but especially the soft kind, so I figured she'd probably like these.

When Mom saw the bag, though, her eyes lit up with delight. "Oh, these take me back to childhood!" she exclaimed. "My grandpa used to buy these Scottie dogs for me and my sisters when I was a little girl!" And she ate several with obvious relish. Very pleased with the reception they'd gotten, I made a mental note to buy some more Scottie dog licorice for Mom next Christmas.

Only there was no "next Christmas" for Mom. In early August 2020, she slipped and fell hard against the white wooden chest she used as a coffee table, breaking at least one rib and puncturing one of her lungs. She was rushed to the hospital and intubated, but she promptly went into cardiac arrest. By the time my siblings finally got hold of me to break the news, she was already dead.

It's been almost two years. On most days, I can get things done. I can run errands. I can do dishes and fold laundry. I can cook meals. I can scoop out the cat box. I can change the bedsheets. It's all normal, everyday household stuff that requires little or no thought to accomplish. I can function. It's fine. I can do this.

And every now and then I come across an object like this, something that tears at the edges of the ragged hole in the center of my heart that won't heal and won't go away.

The pandemic is still a danger, although more and more people are pretending it's over. I don't want to encourage anyone to throw caution to the wind, especially when people are still actively dying of this plague, and when many others are struggling with long-haul damage to their bodies after being infected. Nonetheless, I want to encourage you to embrace the slogan at the top of this bag.

You never know what life is going to throw at you next.

Live a little.

If Mom were still alive, I'm sure she'd agree.

The house on Oakmont Lane

Our family moved into a rental house in Provo, Utah in the last hot days of August, 1983. I can remember that specifically because one day after we finished unloading the moving van into our new temporary home, I started the school year as a freshman at Provo High. I literally didn't know a single soul there, and my mother said that when she dropped me off at the front of the school campus on the first day, I was shaking like a leaf. But despite my fears, the kids at Provo High turned out to be kinder and significantly more welcoming to a shy, awkward teenage nerd-girl than the kids in the middle school I'd left behind in Northern California. I found my feet relatively quickly.

The rental house was a prefab home with an unfinished basement and a back yard full of boulders and little else. But it was at the lower elevations of Y Mountain, in an area known as the East Bench of the Oak Hills neighborhood, and the west-facing windows offered a gorgeous view of the city and BYU nestled into the valley, Utah Lake out beyond that, and the Oquirrh Mountains framing the sunsets. Even on days where "inversions" made the air khaki-colored and gritty and the Geneva Steel Mill did its best to give everyone in the valley lung cancer, the view was still striking.

And then there was the allure of the house right next door.

Looking up from the cul-de-sac, 2021

It was an imposing-looking place, two stories of red brick and an unfinished partial daylight basement, built in 1979 (so only four years old when we moved into the neighborhood). There was a minor tragedy about the place; the original owners had built it from the ground up, sparing no expense to create their dream home. It turned out that "sparing no expense" was their downfall, as they ran out of money and lost the house to a bank repossession. Hoping to get it back some day, they had placed a lien on the property that made it difficult for prospective buyers to purchase it. It was a gorgeous home, but we assumed we'd never have the finances to buy it, let alone the ability to navigate the legal thicket associated with the lien.

As circumstances would have it, the original owners still lived in the area when we moved in, and they attended the same church congregation we did. We'd been living in Provo for about a year when they discovered Mom was interested in buying their house, and by that point they had largely given up on ever getting it back. They liked Mom, and they liked our family, so they decided to remove one of the roadblocks to purchase by taking the lien off the property. Further, because it was bank-owned and had some plumbing issues from having stood vacant for a few years, it was offered at a very good price. In the summer of 1984, Mom bought the house on Oakmont Lane and we made what was probably the simplest move ever -- we just picked everything up and trotted it next door.

The house, like all houses, had its quirks. The huge room over the garage was originally meant to be an open-air deck, the solar panels on the side of the house didn't work properly, the roof leaked, the plumbing needed several repairs, and there was one particular section of the water pipes that tended to freeze solid in the Utah winters. But it didn't matter. We owned a home again, and it was ours.

When we first moved in, the house had three bedrooms, all on the top floor. With six kids in the family, we really wanted one more bedroom. See that little window at the bottom of the house, in the daylight part of the basement? That was the area where one of our neighbors, a contractor, framed in and finished a bedroom for my sister Julie and me. We shared that room from the time we moved in until I began a series of moving-aways -- first to a college dorm, then to a shared apartment, then to a year spent working in California with extended family, and then finally when I got married and moved out "for good" in 1993 (Captain Midnight and I did return to live in the basement for a couple of years in the early 2000s).

This place has been our family home for 37 years.

We sold it today.

None of us could afford to keep the place, and in any case Mom specified in her will that we should sell it and divide the proceeds between the six of us. We all knew it would happen eventually. Personally, I haven't lived there since late 2004; there are other places I've called home since. And in all honesty, it was only home because Mom made it that way. Since she died, the sense of "home" has slowly leaked out of the house, diminishing by degrees as the little treasures and furnishings and keepsakes were taken away. Now it's just a place.

But. It was a place where I practiced the piano over and over again, where Dan practiced his trombone, where Julie tried her hand at playing the drums and Tim worked on his practice chanter for bagpipes. It was a place where we sang together, where we told each other dumb jokes and family stories and laughed uproariously at them. It was a place where fights and family tragedies unfolded, too. It was a place where I'd often sneak our long-haired kitty Chamomile, who was supposed to be an outdoor-only cat, into the basement room for a warm, comfortable snooze. It was also the place where I returned with Chamomile's body in a cardboard box after her final visit to the vet, to bury her in the side yard. It was a place where Mom cooked homemade doughnuts at Halloween and oliebollen at New Year's, a place where the whole family (and many friends) congregated for Christmas julbords every year. It was a place where I went out onto the front balcony one winter night, looked down into the cul-de-sac and caught sight of one of my neighbors, a teenage boy, delightedly dancing in the falling snow. It was the place where I graduated from high school, where I spent most of my years in college. It was the place where I first got into dialing up BBSes, became a co-sysop and started meeting users, including a guy who called himself Captain Midnight. It was the place we held the murder mystery dinner party, when Mom first noticed CM and strongly encouraged me to date him. It was the place I first announced to my family that CM and I were engaged. It was the place where Miss V was born and where she spent most of the first decade of her life being, as my mom called it, "grandma's little sidekick." It was the place we came back to when CM lost his job and we needed somewhere to regroup. It was the place where my siblings and I helped Mom recuperate from the many, many surgeries and other medical procedures she went through during the last twenty years of her life. And it was the place where Mom had the catastrophic fall that ended up taking her away forever.

I know it isn't what it was. But it was home once, the shell of the place that used to contain our family. In many ways, it was the last vestige of Mom's presence on earth.

Maybe that's why it hurts more than I thought it would to let it go.

I just hope the new family that moves in will love the house on Oakmont Lane as much as we did. I hope they'll enjoy the million-dollar view of the valley, and I hope they'll learn how to accelerate into the cul-de-sac in winter so they can make it up into the garage without their car slipping down the icy driveway. I hope they'll enjoy taking a bath in the walk-in bathtub downstairs, and that they'll always have enough hot water. I hope they'll relish eating the apples and grapes that grow in the back yard, and that they'll become good friends with the neighbors (who are some of the most awesome people ever). I hope it will be cozy for them around the fireplace on the main floor, especially on January nights. Maybe they'll even choose to keep Mom's "Mexican restaurant yellow" color scheme in the dining room, because they'll find it as joyful and sunny a color as she did.

I hope it'll become home for them the way it was home for us.

And I hope they'll fill their home with memories to replace the ones we took away with us.

Mr. Pollak

Can you remember a certain person from your past who entered your life and forever changed it for the better?

My mother did. His name was Mr. Pollak.

There are a couple of things you need to know about Karin, my mom. She was accidentally dropped on her head as an infant (no, really), and for many years she was convinced that this incident had caused some kind of brain damage, because she couldn't learn to read. While all the kids around her were working their way through "See Jane run. Run, Jane, run," little Karin was just trying to figure out how the marks on paper were connected to the words people were saying, and failing miserably. As she struggled through early grade school, still trying and failing to understand the mechanics of reading, she became more and more certain she was too dumb to learn anything. And her fourth-grade teacher didn't help matters; she too was convinced Karin was stupid, and actually told Karin's parents not to expect very much from their daughter, as she simply didn't have the mental capacity to succeed in school. By the end of fourth grade, after having been mocked and neglected in class all year, Karin had actually lost ground in her education.

Then came fifth grade. That year, Karin got a teacher who was brand new to her school, a young man who was friendly and kind and played the guitar. His name was Mr. Pollak, and it didn't take him very long to notice that Karin was struggling. One day, early in the school year, he asked her to stay after class. I imagine Karin was terrified. But this time, she wasn't put through another round of being told she was stupid, of having her textbooks taken away and given to another child, as she had in fourth grade.

"Karin," said Mr. Pollak. "You can't read, can you." It was a statement, not a question.

Karin burst into tears. Not only was she stupid, she'd been found out -- and by the teacher she liked the most. But Mr. Pollak insisted that Karin wasn't stupid, and that she could learn to read. In fact, he would teach her himself.

And for many after-school sessions running, that's just what he did. The standard reading method being taught in mid-1950s California wasn't working for Karin, so Mr. Pollak chose other methods. Since phonics made no sense to her, he taught her different word attack skills, how to recognize short, recurring words first, and how to move straight to sight reading (some 95% of adult reading is sight reading, not phonetic -- we only use phonic attack skills to conquer unfamiliar words).

By the time Karin finished fifth grade, she was reading at grade level -- and it's not an overstatement to say that finally learning to read changed the course of her life. Not only could she read capably, but when one of her younger sisters also showed signs of struggle with reading comprehension, Karin created a "play school" over the summer and taught her little sister the same word attack skills Mr. Pollak had taught her. It was the first time Karin realized she was good at teaching.

It would still take a good part of the next decade for Karin to realize that she really was intelligent and capable -- but by then she'd graduated from high school and made it into college, where she developed a passion for history and geography. She went on to teach high school history, geography and general music, then got married and had a family of children who all learned to love reading. (We were the kids who were constantly trying to check out our own weights in books at the local library.) Later, when her husband died and Karin went back to teaching school, she certified to teach special education. For the rest of her working life, she specialized in teaching kids who struggled just as she had in school -- kids with learning disabilities, kids whose teachers were convinced they were nothing but trouble, but also kids who just needed the right kind of nurturing to learn and improve. I'm convinced Karin was such an effective teacher in part because she empathized so strongly with her kids. (I remember she told me that one of the first kids who came to her for one-on-one reading assistance had dyslexia and struggled to sound out every word. "At first I had to sit behind her every time she read out loud," Mom said, "because I'd start remembering just what it was like to struggle so hard and still not understand and feel stupid, and I'd tear up. I didn't want to have to explain to this girl why I was crying.")

Mom also developed a personal, lifelong passion for reading. Her love of history led her to discover all kinds of first-person histories and historical novels, but she also loved children's literature -- whether it was the classic books she hadn't been able to read in childhood, the more recent Newbery Medal winners, or the hugely popular Harry Potter series, she'd gladly devour them all. Diabetes ravaged her eyes, but Mom had surgeries to fix the damage and carried on reading with the help of large-print books and audiobooks. She was a member of a local book club that met once a month for spirited discussion, and although near the end of her life she was often ill and homebound, she rarely missed a meeting. (This month the group is reading a book Mom loved and recommended: Before We Were Yours, a historical novel by Lisa Wingate.)

Last year, after decades of reflection and gratitude, Mom decided that if Mr. Pollak were still alive, she would write to thank him. We searched online and found someone with the right name, who was about the right age, living in another state, and Mom wrote a letter thanking him profusely and letting him know how the course of her life was changed by his efforts. But then she never sent it. I'm not sure if she was worried she might have the wrong Mr. Pollak, or that this letter out of the blue might seem too forward or too gushy, or if she simply got cold feet, but the letter was still there, dated late 2019, atop her writing desk when she died last month.

My sister and I read the letter and, after getting a bit verklempt over it, decided we'd send it to Mr. Pollak anyway. We weren't sure whether he would remember Karin from so many years ago, or even whether it was the right Mr. Pollak, but we sent it off with a little note indicating that Karin had passed away, but had always wanted Mr. Pollak to know how he'd changed her life for good.

About a week later, a handwritten letter arrived in Mom's mailbox. Turns out it was the right Mr. Pollak. After I opened and read it, it took me a while to stop sniffling and transcribe the letter so the rest of my siblings could read it. I haven't gotten his permission, so I hope he'll forgive me for sharing this transcription:

Dear Ms. [Soozcat],

I fear that I might not be able to fully express my gratitude to you for forwarding your mother's letter to me. The effect was like standing beneath a waterfall of sunshine.

I want to express my heartfelt sympathy to you upon the untimely loss of your mother. I hope that you have the support of many loving people who will nurture you during this time of grief and mourning.

Perhaps it was because it was my first year of teaching (age 21) that I have a clear memory of a number of students in that class, Karin among them. Now, at age 87, after a 40 year career in the profession, much of the time is spent looking into the rear view mirror of memory. You can't imagine how gratifying it is to know that I was of some help to your mother. Whatever it is that I may have contributed, it is your mother who deserves the credit for all that she has accomplished during her lifetime for it was she who did the hard work that made the many gifts she bestowed during the years she was on this Earth. Please take comfort in knowing that she did indeed leave the world a better place than it was when she entered it.

Thank you for your very thoughtful gift. My prayers go out to you and your family.

All the best,
Ken Pollak

Thank you, Mr. Pollak. You might not believe your contribution was significant, but it meant the world to Mom and to everyone who learned from her. And like her, you have left the world a better place than it was when you entered it.

The minefield

I don't know what your experiences have been or if you've dealt with grief in your life, but if you haven't, let me say this: grief is probably not what you think it is.

In the first world, almost every event runs on some kind of timeline. There's even a timeline in the way we handle the mechanics of death and burial: the time of the memorial service, the interment or cremation, the paperwork to be filled out, the people to inform, all fit a kind of macabre schedule. But grief doesn't work like that. It's not something that can be scheduled, like a vacation or a work meeting. It's not something that runs like a season, ending promptly at an equinox. It doesn't hew to any particular time frame. It is a force unto itself.

Grief is like being forced to march through a minefield. The mines are randomly scattered everywhere, just under the soil, and there's no way to tell by looking whether an open stretch of ground is safe or strewn with mines. The only way to find out is to move across it. Whenever you step on a mine -- because you will -- and it goes off, a blast of grief overwhelms you and shuts you down. And at first, this happens a lot. At first, the ground is particularly treacherous and any patch of ground could be harboring a mine. But as you continue to traverse the minefield, more and more of the mines are gone because you've already blown them up. Still, the greater the love you had, the more intense the grief is, and the more likely it is that you'll step on another mine, even long after you think the field is empty.

Right now I'm dealing with a lot of land mines. I went into QFC today intending to buy a few things, but I saw something in there that made me leave almost immediately. I didn't want the other shoppers to think I was crazy for standing in front of a display of Australian licorice, bawling like an infant under my disposable mask. I didn't want to explain to strangers what was going through my mind ("Ooh, I should get some of those for M--") just before the mine went off. So I went and sat in my car for a while, and cried until I was hollow.

It'll be a while before I can look at soft black licorice without thinking of Mom. It'll be a while before I can catch the scent of rose perfume without feeling that hollow emptiness of loss. It'll be a while before I can sing the hymn "How Great Thou Art" without thinking of my brother Dan, who hates to cry, choking up on the final verse as he sang it at Mom's funeral. I think most people know this instinctively, even if they haven't gone through grief themselves, and that's why they often give those who are grieving a wide berth. It's uncomfortable, not knowing what to say or how to deal with people who might break down at any moment over some little thing that reminds them the grief isn't done with them yet.

If you see this behavior coming from me or any of my family, please be patient with us. We're trying to work our way through a minefield, and it might take a while.

Kari Sue says hi

If you missed my mom's funeral service, you can see it here. (Don't worry, it's closed-casket.)

[Posted to social media; worth preserving here.]

HERE are lots of things you can do to memorialize someone. People with money buy buildings and put the loved one's name on them (e.g., "the George Q. Zannini Wing of Memorial Hospital"), or start some kind of trust fund or scholarship in the person's name. And that's all very well and good, but such memorials don't give anyone else an idea of what the person was really like. The same holds true with book dedications, works of art, etc.

I don't have a bazillion dollars, and even if I did, I wouldn't want to create a meaningless memorial to my mom. She was the kind of person who would have been horribly embarrassed if anyone commissioned a statue of her, and I don't think she would have been impressed to have her name on a building.

But Mom loved people. She was constantly looking for ways to help others, even when she lost most of her mobility and became home-bound. And if there was something she could do to help someone else and make that person's day a little brighter, she would do it.

So here's what I'm gonna do. I'm going to start actively looking for ways to show kindness to the people with whom I come in contact each day. I'll help wherever I see a need. And if people ask, as they sometimes do, "What can I do in return?" I'll say, "When you do something kind for someone else, be sure to tell them 'Kari Sue says hi.' My mom would have liked that."

That will be Karin Buck's viral memorial. And through it, people who never knew my mom will get a little glimpse of what she was like, and how the world was a better place with her in it.

You're more than welcome to join me in doing little kind things and telling people "Kari Sue says hi" if you like. Mom would have liked that too.

Let me help you

My sister-in-law and I drove together to the mortuary. I talked nervously most of the way there, trying to keep my mind busy with trivia so I wouldn't think about what was coming. I'd been successfully dodging that mental boulder for several days, ever since Tuesday evening when my brother called to tell me Mom didn't make it. Even staying at my mom's house, looking through her photos and papers, sleeping in her bed, I could defer the dread by pretending she was just in the hospital again. She'd been so close to death on so many other occasions, and she'd pulled through each time. It was easier to imagine this was just another one of those times. Even standing in the mortuary foyer, talking to the mortician, walking down the hall, I was fine.

But then we turned left and went into the room, and there was her body.

If you've never seen a dead person, let me destroy a common trope for you. A dead person does not look asleep. A dead person looks dead. There's no gentle rise and fall of breathing, no soft muscular movement in the arms or legs, no subtle changes of expression in the face. Everything is completely, impossibly still. The shock of it is realizing that this person who once moved and thought and talked and laughed and loved is now a still, cold object, like a figure made of wax, and she will never move again.

I didn't want to touch her at first. But that was why we were there: to dress her body and prepare her for burial.

It was easier to touch the top of her head, her hair, first. That felt pretty much the same as it always did. Someone had parted her short, straight hair on one side and brushed it back, the way she might have done it herself, and there was something calming about that detail.

Her feet were the kind of cold you don't usually experience with living people, unless they have hypothermia. We started there, working carefully -- "Her skin is very fragile," warned the mortician -- to clothe her. It was oddly like trying to dress a very large doll; we needed help moving her to one side or the other, carefully raising limbs that would not yield, pulling articles of clothing up and around and otherwise into place.

And then I was pulling up the long sleeve of her dress. There was nothing special about that sleeve; it had a simple, straight cuff on the end. I just had to pull it up around her fingers to her wrist. But as I got it into place and smoothed it down, I could hear my own four-year-old voice saying,

"Tighter, Mama! Make them really tight!"

My mama was bent over one of my shoes, trying to tie the shoelaces as tightly as she could. I was already in kindergarten, already reading, already able to do a lot of things on my own, but I couldn't tie my own shoes. And I lived in dread of them coming loose on the playground because I wouldn't be able to tie them again, and I didn't want my classmates to know.

"If I tie these any tighter," Mama said, "I'm going to cut off your circulation." But she pulled them a little tighter, made the knot a little firmer. She was 30 years old, after all, and had boundless energy. "There you go," she said. "I need to teach you how to do this yourself--"

--and then I was suddenly back in the room with the body, with those hands that had tied my shoes, lying so still. And the grief hit me full force, with no way to hold it back -- and I sobbed so hysterically that it must have sounded like laughter.

Those hands that willingly tied my shoelaces so tightly, that changed my diapers, that fed me and washed me and cared for me when I was a tiny infant incapable of doing anything for myself, that did countless loads of laundry and sinks of dishes, that made thousands of meals, cleaned scraped knees and dried tears and patted cheeks, dialed my phone number and wrote loving letters and did a myriad other clever and wonderful things -- couldn't move.

She could do nothing for herself. She couldn't sit up. She couldn't ask for help. She couldn't even make sure her body would be treated with care or dressed with dignity for her own burial.

But she had taught me through years of example how to care for other people, and now I could do this one final thing for her.

It's all right, Mama. I'm here. Let me help you.

Mom

My mother, Karin Suzanne Eriksson Buck, died this evening. She was 76 years old.

I don't have much else to say about this right now.

Pandemic: Robbed

20 years ago this week, Captain Midnight and I got invited to a goofy party at Rob and Marie Cummings' house in Bellevue. Rob was turning 37, so he decided to host a Monty Python-themed "Old Woman" party (watch Monty Python and the Holy Grail a few times and you'll get it) and he asked all partygoers to come dressed as their favorite characters from any Python sketch. If I remember correctly, I dressed up as the deranged chef from the Dirty Fork Sketch, and CM went as the random street flasher (with a large sign reading "BOO!" under his trenchcoat). It was just as silly and fun as you might imagine; I think everyone had a great time.

So today is Rob's 57th birthday.

He isn't here to celebrate it, though. He died last month of congestive heart failure.

As his widow, Marie, expressed it, "While he did not die directly of COVID-19, he delayed seeking medical help because of his fear of contracting it."

We didn't get to see him one last time. We didn't get to thank him for his friendship or say goodbye.

We weren't even able to attend his funeral service.

Let me put this in terms Rob might appreciate: if the coronavirus were Mr. Creosote, I'd give it a wafer-thin mint and calmly watch it explode. It needs to die, and it needs to die now.

The cat in the trap

OXY is still missing. It's been two months.

We borrowed traps from MEOW Cat Rescue the first day she was gone and started setting and baiting them immediately, putting in catnip and the smelliest food we could find. We set and checked traps around the neighborhood for weeks. We reported Roxy as missing to the microchip company. We put up huge pink LOST - PLEASE HELP posters all through the neighborhood so that no one could miss them. We put up "Lost Cat" alerts on social media sites and in specialty groups on Facebook (Lost Cats of King County, etc.) We bought an infrared camera to try to catch sight of her next to a trap. We tried to hire several pet detectives to come out and help us search (none of them would come to our part of Washington). We hired a man with a cat-sniffing dog ($300) who could not find her. (If you have a lost cat, we strenuously do not recommend this service -- he will probably end up chasing your cat further away, which is what happened to Roxy.) We performed two house-to-house searches, one in our neighborhood and one around my friend Wendy's house where Roxy was spotted. We put out traps and food near Wendy's house (Roxy didn't touch them). We borrowed a drop trap and stayed up two nights running with it trying to catch Roxy (she didn't come near it). We printed more than 1800 flyers asking people to help us find Roxy and hand-delivered them to every single house in the neighborhood. (If people had "No Soliciting" signs up, we took note of their addresses and mailed the flyers to them, so nobody was missed.) We went through the neighborhood at night looking for her, sometimes silently, sometimes calling softly. We bought an e-book from a pet detective in Texas to try to figure out things we weren't already doing. We changed our voice mail message to mention we are looking for Roxy and checked the phone multiple times a day for leads. We followed up on every lead every time someone called to say "I think I saw your cat." We asked people to check their security cameras for signs of Roxy. We offered $50 to anyone who could provide a verifiable picture of Roxy within the last 24 hours. (So far, no one has.) We created a Pawboost alert for social media that went out all over the greater Seattle area. We put up "lost cat" ads on Craigslist. We checked and continue to check the shelter websites every night and morning to see if Roxy has been brought in. We gave flyers to local vets, pet stores and MEOW Cat Rescue. We let all the local shelters know we were looking for Roxy. We left water and a little cardboard "kitty house" next to the door in case she found her way home. We left the door open all day and night in case she found her way home. We prayed, had many others praying for us, we fasted for Roxy, and I put a cat's name on the temple prayer roll. (I'm not sure if it's allowed, but I did it anyway.)

All in all, we have spent nearly $2,000 so far to try to get Roxy home. We've also lost many hours of sleep and I dropped about 10 pounds from constant worry. And nothing has come of it. Roxy remains missing, and we are trying to come to terms with the fact that we may never see her again.

Yes, it hurts. Every day. And yes, I'm bitter about it. If you went to this much trouble to find a lost pet and had absolutely no success, I guarantee you would be too.

While the traps didn't work as we'd hoped, they did yield some surprises. We caught two different opossums in various locations. We also started leaving a trap baited in our front yard in the vain hope of catching Roxy if she found her way home again. And while we didn't catch Roxy, on the morning of July 11 we found something interesting in the trap.

It was a young cat (the vet estimates 10 to 11 months old), a brown tabby with a white ruff and socks and green eyes. The cat was relatively small and underfed, but had the long legs and big paws of a lerpy teenager. He had no tags or collar, no microchip (we checked at two vets with three different chip readers), had never been neutered and probably never had his shots. He was also ravenously hungry and would eat almost anything, he had fleas and showed other signs of having lived on the street for months. But the most impressive thing we noticed about him was the level of fight in him. Somehow, after having followed the siren call of sardines into the trap, he managed to pull the entire heavy oilcloth trap cover into the trap with him -- probably while trying to escape. He then vented his frustrations on the cover, which was pretty mangled by the time we found him. (We're going to pay for a replacement... sorry, MEOW.)

He appeared to be a little street cat, but he wasn't feral -- he didn't hiss when humans approached his cage...

... he liked being close to us, and he loved being petted and brushed, so we knew that at some point in his past he'd been around people. Our best guess is that this cat was part of an unplanned litter of kittens from someone's unspayed pet. He was obviously played with and socialized, but when he grew past the "cute kitten" stage he was probably taken to a neighborhood far from home and dumped out to fend for himself.

I'm just gonna leave this here

All the signs pointed to this being an unwanted cat. Nobody had given him an indoor home, no one had chipped or even collared him, nobody seemed to be looking for him. I guess we could have decided it wasn't our problem, opened the trap and let him run away. But that's not what we did. We know firsthand what anguish it is to lose a pet. Besides, we've seen coyotes in our neighborhood. We weren't about to let this kitty run headlong into predators, no matter how much fight he had in him.

"Hi! You got treats?"

Also, he was really cute and a huge flirt.

Now, our county has laws about what to do if you find a stray cat. You can't just say "o well, finders keepers" and merrily yoink him off the street. The law stipulates two options: either you take him to the county shelter, where they try to find his owners for THREE WHOLE DAYS and then put him up for adoption, or you can keep him in your own home at your expense for A FULL MONTH, advertising him as a found cat on local bulletin boards and on the shelter website so that his owner -- if there is one -- has every chance to come forward and claim him. Once the month has passed, you're then free to pay the licensing fee and keep the animal if you want. Because we're kinda dumb (and because he was really cute), we chose to do it the hard way and foster the cat in our home. (And if you're reading this, it means a full month has passed with no contact from an owner.)

So was this a cheap way to get a cat? Well, not the way we did it. This kitty has already been to the vet five times -- to scan multiple times for a microchip, to find out why he was coughing, to check up on an enlarged heart (his heart is unusually big, but it works just fine)...

Alas, the Cone of Shame.

... to get him neutered, microchipped, screened for FeLV and FIV (negative on both), given all his basic shots and treated for fleas. You know, all the stuff owners are supposed to do for their pets.

And since he's going to be an indoor cat, we also put a bright orange collar on him and a tag that says "I'M LOST!" If you'd like to know why, read this.

This cat has been through several name changes. Because we trapped him on July 11, which in the USA is 7/11 (aka Free Slurpee Day at the 7-Eleven convenience store chain), we first called him Slurpee, but we soon decided that was an insufficiently dignified name for a masculine cat. Then, as the call of the wild began to tug at him and he came up with novel, loud and annoying ways to attempt egress from the house at 2 a.m. ...

"Some day, window. Some day."

... we toyed with the idea of calling him Hairy Mewdini, Escape Artist. But one day I just realized he looked like a Charlie cat. So we started calling him Charlie, and it's stuck.

It's still possible that Roxy will come back. If she does, we'll need to find a good home for Charlie. While we think Charlie is social enough to tolerate another cat, Roxy is far too timid to handle other animals in the house. But if she remains missing, we intend to keep this guy. He's stopped trying to escape (well, mostly), he's well-fed, well-groomed and flea-free, he gets to play with toys, randomly attack the sofa, and chase Tigger (a catnip-filled knitted tiger toy)...

... he sleeps anywhere he wants, and he has people who give him lots of love and attention and who think his occasional naughtiness is more endearing than it is annoying.

Local street cat makes good. Film at 11.

Daddy

This is my daddy, Danny Lee Buck.

He was born in small-town Indiana in January 1942, during the early days of the United States' entry into World War II. He was a Midwest child of Southern parents, the youngest of two boys. Entries in the archives of the local newspapers will inform you that he received public honors for his elementary school grades, that he played tennis and croquet, that he took a date to the high school dances. They will not tell you that he had a lifelong struggle with depression and anxiety, and self-medicated with alcohol in high school.

Next, you will find him in the 1960s archives of the Banyan, the yearbook for Brigham Young University. These archives reveal that he was politically conservative and heavily associated with the printing and graphic design studios at school. The photo taken above was in his junior year, when he began to go by "Dan L. Buck" rather than his given name of Danny, in an effort to sound more professional. It will not tell you that he joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in his early twenties, nor that he took a few years' time off from school to serve a mission for the Church in the Pacific Northwest. It will also not tell you that in the late 1960s he was set up on a blind date with a Northern California girl named Karin, nor that the date went significantly better than either of them had expected.

There is a marriage certificate on file dated August 1968, indicating that Dan and Karin were married in Salt Lake City, Utah. It will not tell you that they were actually married twice; since Dan's parents were not Latter-day Saints and therefore could not enter the Salt Lake Temple, Dan and Karin were married in a civil ceremony the day before their sealing so his parents could attend their wedding.

There are multiple California birth certificates on file starting in 1969 and running through 1978, as Dan and Karin's six children were born in the East Bay Area. They will not tell you how the family struggled to live on a freelance graphic designer's salary, how they had to live as frugally as possible; they will not tell you all the ways two inventive parents came up with fun free or low-cost family activities; they will not tell you how often during the 1970s the parents sacrificed precious time and money to cross the country with a half-dozen children in an orange VW bus, even during the throes of the gas crisis, so the kids could get to know their relatives in Indiana.

And then there's the death certificate, dated December 12, 1981. It states the deceased was 39 years old; that the cause of death was a one-person car accident. It does not state what the police believed, that the old orange VW bus slid off Bailey Road and over an embankment to try to avoid another car that might have been playing "chicken" on the dark, wet road. It does not state that Dan had been out that Saturday afternoon painting holiday windows for local businesses in an effort to pick up a little more money for Christmas. It definitely does not say how a local police officer panicked on the phone, bluntly stating "no, ma'am, he's dead," when he called my mother that night to inform her of the accident.

The obituary printed in the Contra Costa Times states that Danny Lee Buck was buried on December 16, 1981. It mentions that he left behind a wife and six young children. It will not tell you how many people, most of them total strangers, read that obituary and spontaneously decided to give his surviving family the best Christmas Day they had ever experienced.

There are all sorts of documents recording milestones in my dad's life. They can give you many facts and figures, and they're helpful for determining where he was living and what he was doing at various times. But they cannot tell you about how gentle he was, how much of a mental burden he placed on himself to excel, all his goofy dad jokes and extemporaneous parody songs, how many times he took his children for hikes along Lime Ridge, or the glorious mess that was his design studio. They cannot tell you how essential his faith was to him, how spiritually sensitive he was, how he would come home and swing his kids around by their arms in a dizzying circle in the back yard, how he could barely cook, but had the ability to eyeball a design paste-up to within a sixteenth of an inch, how he couldn't write legibly, but created the most beautiful hand-drawn calligraphy, how much fear and stress he kept bottled up over the years. Documents can give you facts about a person, but they can't give you essentials about who that person really was.

And there is no document anywhere that can tell you how much I miss him.

William Everett "Bud" Luckey, 1934-2018

I just found this out today, but near the end of February, Bud Luckey passed away.

He wasn't necessarily a household name (though he certainly was in this household), but if you were born sometime from the late '60s onward, I can guarantee you've seen his work. Whether it was the in-betweener cartoons he created for Sesame Street, the work he did on animated films The Mouse and His Child or The Secret of NIMH, or all the later voice and animation work he did for Pixar, Luckey had an easily recognizable style and a singularly graceful way of making a point in his stories.

If Pixar could do one perfect thing as a tribute to their friend and colleague, it would be to create a new version of this gem-like, Luckey-animated short, first seen on Sesame Street and titled "Infinity":

(You can really see the influence of his character designs on A Bug's Life, can't you?)

It'd be nice to see a reworked version of this short as the intro to The Incredibles 2 this summer, but realistically that would require a rush production, and any tribute to Bud Luckey needs to be done right.

By the way, for those who have watched the Toy Story movies, I found out from the obituary that Bud's son's name is Andy.

Godspeed, mister. You enriched the childhood of so many people. Well done.

David Brian Ashton

David is my cousin, but like all my cousins on my mom's side of the family, he's nearly as close as my siblings. I've written about him here before -- actually, a couple of times.

My Ashton cousins, clockwise from left: Lisa, Jon, David and Tom.

As you might be able to discern from the photo, David is a complete goofball. He loves telling naughty jokes and laughing hysterically. He's always been a nurturing person; I suppose he picked up the trait from his mom, who was a registered nurse. He loves to cook and eat. He loves Madonna and belting out show tunes. He loves the Muppets, especially the fabulous Miss Piggy. He loves his family. He adores his nieces and nephews.

And he's been aware for some time now that he was born with a congenital heart defect.

For the last few years, David has been in and out of the hospital -- surgeries to replace his mitral valve, more surgeries to fix problems with the new valve, surgeries to install a pacemaker, etc., etc. Just recently he had a bout of pneumonia that was worse than he'd imagined, but things seemed to be clearing up.

On Monday, David went into work at the Pier 1 he manages. He put in a full day of work, finished up for the day, went out to the parking lot -- and suddenly collapsed. A co-worker saw him go down and called 911. The paramedics did everything they could, but they couldn't stabilize David's heartbeat, so they took him to the hospital. There the doctors tried numerous methods to get David's heart working again, but nothing worked.

David passed away around 9:30 that night. He had just turned 41.

David and little Miss V.

David and Miss V were very close, especially when she was young. He often took care of her, and she thought of him as her Uncle David (technically, they're first cousins once removed, but who's counting?). This has been hard for her; she wanted to tell him she loved him one more time.

Mormons don't really hew to the classic Protestant notion of heaven and hell; we do believe that when people die, their spirits go to a place called the spirit world. It's here on Earth, though perhaps not in the same dimension; we don't ordinarily see them, nor do they see us. So although I will miss David tremendously, I believe he is not that far away. I believe that when my time here is up, I will see him again. And I take great comfort in thinking about David being joyously reunited with his mom, his grandmas, and the other people he loved so much who had gone from his life. As my sister pointed out, if there's such a thing as food in the spirit world, they're all probably in the kitchen making casseroles right now (David loved casseroles, especially tuna casserole with peas and crushed potato chips).

Anyway, I'm making plans to drive out of state to attend his funeral, which is scheduled for this coming Monday. Lots of time with family, lots of stories about David, probably lots of laughing and crying. After all, as David would readily tell you, he was kind of a big deal.

What happened to Catherine

Early last month, as everyone was going about Christmas preparations and so forth, my friend Catherine died of what appears to have been a heart attack. Because it happened so suddenly, and because I was unable to attend the funeral, in some ways it still doesn't seem quite real; I feel as though I could walk the few blocks to her home, knock on the front door, and she'd answer.

I've been thinking about what happened to her -- not in the sense of wondering about the circumstances that took her life, but about what the heart attack took away, and where it went. No one really knows what happens to a spirit -- the indefinable presence that creates a living human being, the part of Catherine that made her Catherine -- when someone dies, though there are a number of competing theories. Some are more compelling than others.

The broadly atheist view of death -- that there is no such thing as a soul or spirit, so when someone dies, he or she ceases to be, save what remains in recorded ephemera indicating his or her former existence -- is the least compelling theory for me. If we were beings shaped solely by chance evolutionary processes to live for a short while, pass on our genes if possible, inevitably die and leave little to no trace of our lives on earth, I suspect we would also have evolved with a sense of mild indifference toward the death of others. We might feel about a friend's life the way we feel about a particularly good lunch -- well, that was worthwhile, but now it's over; when I hunger again, I'll find something else to fill the void. Instead, we mourn. We feel the keenest pain over the death of a friend or loved one, wish desperately to have him or her back again, and sense a consistent void made by that person's absence, one that nothing else quite seems to fill. Even in the case of catastrophes in faraway places, where we did not know personally anyone who was affected, the human tendency is to feel sorrow and empathy for the loss of human life -- and to be appalled by those who lack such empathy.

I'm also not much of a fan of the quasi-agnostic idea that a beloved deceased person continues to live on in you through your thoughts and memories. This is manifestly unsatisfying. If all I need is many memories to make a person live again, then my mom already "lives on in me," and she's not even dead. No matter how well you knew someone, there's a deep gulf of difference between recalling static memories and talking to a living person. It's something akin to the difference between a single recording of a jazz performance in a jukebox and the wild, virtuosic improvisations of live jazz. A person you know well is somewhat predictable in his or her responses, but because living beings constantly grow and change, he or she will also occasionally make a comment or react in a way you never would have expected -- sudden blooms of caprice that can make the conversation a surprise and a delight. You don't get that quality from memories; they are limited by what you already know of a person, so there's no possibility of unpredictability. Plus, the human brain being what it is, our memories of a person tend to become distorted over time; it's easy for our brains to reduce the life of a complex individual to a single defining trait, or to reinforce one set of memories while letting another set attenuate to nothing. After a while one's subjective memory of a person might come to resemble the actual person the way a caricature resembles a photograph.

My religious beliefs, like those of most people, inform my thoughts about the human spirit and what happens to it after death. Mormonism, unlike many other Christian faiths, posits that even a spirit has a physical component, though one that may be impossible for human beings to perceive. (Joseph Smith taught, "There is no such thing as immaterial matter. All spirit is matter, but it is more fine or pure, and can only be discerned by purer eyes. We cannot see it; but when our bodies are purified we shall see that it is all matter.") Coming from this belief, I can't help but think about what little I know of the laws of physics, about E=mc², and of the theory of conservation of mass: that matter and energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only transformed. Well, why not apply that to death? If a spirit -- the thing that made my friend a living being, that made her who she was -- is a finer form of matter, and a person dies, does that person's spirit simply cease to be, or is it more likely that the matter or energy of a human spirit is not destroyed at death, but transformed? Is it that difficult to suppose that, just as mass is neither created nor destroyed, the human spirit is in some way conserved at the time of death?

I began by saying that no one really knows what happens to a spirit at death, and I reiterate that I don't know with absolute certainty that these things are so. (To verify it, I'd have to die, which would certainly hamper my ability to make a report.) But I do sense, in a way that feels deeply right even if I cannot prove it, that the spirits of people we knew and loved are not gone forever -- indeed, that they are not very far away. Maybe that's why it still seems to me that I could go knock on Catherine's door and she'd answer; perhaps, in a slightly different dimension from ours, Catherine is busy at home -- just as she was in life -- and listening for a friend to come by and knock.

That's the deal

Why love, if losing hurts so much? I have no answers anymore: only the life I have lived. Twice in that life I've been given the choice: as a boy and as a man. The boy chose safety, the man chooses suffering. The pain now is part of the happiness then. That's the deal.

--C.S. "Jack" Lewis, from the film Shadowlands

As you're probably well aware if you've been reading this blog for a while, my father died in a car accident about a month after I turned 12. That may seem like a young age to lose a parent, and it was -- but I was the oldest of six siblings, the youngest of whom had just turned three at the time. Of all my siblings, I spent the longest time with my father and have the most and clearest memories of him, some happier than others.

I have memories of listening to Dad make up silly stories and parody songs on the fly; memories of being picked up, run down the hall and tossed onto the queen-sized bed with a huge bounce; memories of Dad hanging onto the back of my bike, running along behind me as I tried to get the hang of balancing on two wheels; memories of flying kites and foraging for crops gone wild in the field that had once been a farm across from our house; memories of Dad making a puppet show theater or drawing a Christmas scene with soap on our front window, then painting it with tempera paints; memories of Dad, after days and days of sleepless worry, having a loud and scary nervous breakdown in the middle of the night; memories of Dad quietly swimming up to Aunt Linda, basking on her raft in the middle of Lake Alpine, and evilly upending her into the icy water; memories of Dad having no faith in himself, blaming himself for his perceived imperfections almost every day; memories of Dad sleepwalking into Julie's and my bedroom at 1 a.m. and telling us to brush our teeth (an episode he didn't remember in the morning); memories of Dad asking me with tender concern if xxxxxxx had done something to hurt me, and when I said yes, the way his haunted, defeated expression hurt even more than the abuse had, so I just stopped admitting when those incidents happened; memories of Dad and my uncle taking their sons on early morning paper routes and forming a little club called the "Paper Daddies of America"; memories of Dad pushing me high on the swings until I almost kicked the moon; memories of Dad helping me water the cucumber plants growing outside his workroom; memories of Dad losing his cool over the boys listening to the Beatles' Rubber Soul album over and over, finally taking it off the record player and flinging it out the front door into the field; memories of Dad at the drawing board, working on a layout for a client; memories of Dad driving the orange VW bus across the country while Mom handed out sandwiches and soda from the Coleman cooler; memories of Dad sticking drawing pencils into his ears and nose and having Mom take a Polaroid of him; memories of Dad jumping into my grandparents' pool fully clothed, then dragging Mom in after him -- the list goes on and on.

These memories -- strong, vivid, sometimes goofy, always emotionally charged -- are why I miss my dad. He was a creative, sensitive, funny, impatient, imperfect, vibrant, real person. There were things I loved about him as well as things I really didn't like. In short, I have enough memories about him to hunger for more.

It's different for my other siblings. My brothers remember Dad quite a bit; my sisters remember very little. And my youngest sister, Michele, has no memories of Dad at all. It's bothered her for a long time. She was a "Daddy's girl" growing up, always gravitating more to Dad than to Mom, and after he died, she -- barely three, you remember -- couldn't understand what had happened to him. "Where's Daddy?" she asked, over and over again, and when we told her yet again that he had died, her plaintive response was always the same: "But I want him."

When I was younger I thought, naïvely, that my siblings were lucky not to remember Dad. Memories of the dead are keen sharp things, and the closer you hold them to your heart, the more you cut yourself. Wouldn't it be better not to have them, not to carry a source of pain around with you? I don't remember my great-grandfather or my Aunt Bonnie, both of whom died before I was born; my interest in them as people is mere curiosity, with no accompanying ache of loss. I didn't really understand why my little sister could feel such a hole in her center from a man she couldn't even remember.

You know what it took to help me finally figure it out? The death of a man I never met.

I've wanted to meet Robin Williams from the time I was eight years old. Yes, really. I watched him on Mork & Mindy and found him not just funny as an actor, but fascinating as a person. I tried (and failed) to get permission to participate in the Bay Area March of Dimes walk that year, because I knew he would be participating and just maybe I'd get a chance to walk next to him and talk to him for a minute or two. (Oh, shut up -- you expect realistic dreams from an eight-year-old kid?) For some reason as I got older, I still harbored the quiet but unshakable belief that at some point I'd get a chance to meet him in person. I didn't want to be overbearing or annoying or gushy about it -- he struck me as the kind of person who'd be deeply uncomfortable with that kind of attention. I just wanted a chance to walk up to him, shake his hand and say something goofy like, "Thank you, sir, ya done good."

Let's just say that didn't happen.

And now, I think I understand a little more what it must be like for my sister. Yes, there's a particular kind of knifelike pain that comes from having clear memories of the dead. But there's another kind of pain -- a dull crunch, like a heavy weight that comes out of the dark in slow motion to crack hard against your ribcage -- that comes from having no memories when you desperately want them. It's a different kind of pain. But that doesn't make it any less painful.

I'm so sorry, Shelly. I wish I could share what I have with you. I wish you could know your dad the way you want to. Because of what I remember, I know he'd bug you and worry about you and frequently annoy you, but he'd also be proud of you in so many ways. You're his daughter, and you carry inside you many things that are made from him. That's one way of being close to him, of getting to know him better -- to find the things in you that were also part of your dad. I think he'd appreciate that.

Keenan Arthur Galloway

When we first moved to Washington, Captain Midnight and I lived in a little rectangular tract house in the Renton highlands that we semi-affectionately called the Blue Shoebox. It was built during World War II, had crappy baseboard heating and a wood stove, no insulation, a tiny kitchen that seemed tacked on as an afterthought, and a leaking roof in an area where it rains some 9 months of the year. We spent a lot of time wiping the walls with bleach solution to stave off mildew, and didn't spend much time getting to know our neighbors. The sense of isolation was almost tangible.

Then we were introduced to the Galloway family, who became our first real friends in Renton. At the time, Garon and Dawn were a young married couple with a little boy named Keenan. I got to know Dawn by coming over to visit and help with Keenan's everyday health care. Keenan had been born with a number of serious health issues -- club feet, hydrocephalus, ataxic cerebral palsy -- and a congenital diaphragmatic hernia (essentially, a hole in his diaphragm) which had caused his digestive tract to float up into his chest cavity, hampering the development of his heart and lungs. So many doctors told Dawn her son would not live to see his first birthday, but she was determined to find a doctor who believed in Keenan's ability to survive and thrive as much as she and Garon did. And somehow, thanks to their care and Keenan's own determination to live, he kept befuddling the doctors who predicted his early death.

Keenan did a lot of things no one expected him to do. Not only did he live to see his first birthday, he just kept on living to see the birth of his five younger siblings, various milestones in school including high school graduation, participation in track and field events as part of the Special Olympics, and (unfortunately) necessary adventures in and out of the hospital for corrective surgeries and medical emergencies.

Because his lung capacity was never great enough, Keenan was mostly nonverbal, but he figured out ways to make himself understood. He used his body language to respond to verbal comments. He learned signs. He had a sound board. He used social media. More to the point, he often expressed himself through his sense of humor and his big, glorious toothy grin.

When he was a toddler, I used to call it his "lion grin" because his spiky hair and pronounced little canines reminded me of a lion.

(Funnily enough, Keenan adored musicals, including "The Lion King," and the Galloways went to see it when it came to the Paramount in Seattle.) Keenan radiated a sense of happiness and positivity, even on days when he didn't feel well. His infectious grin and the spirit behind it touched pretty much everyone who knew him.

And because he'd already lived so long, I don't think anyone really expected him to die.

Every night before bed, Keenan would come into his parents' room and sign "good night" to them. The night before he died, he went in three different times to tell them good night. Garon is convinced, and I agree, that Keenan had a premonition he would not be seeing them the next morning.

Keenan died on September 8, in his sleep. He was 19 years old.

There's not much I want to say about this...

Remember when I bought the Daruma doll for good luck?

Remember that I said I'd reveal my goal when I colored in the other eye?

Yeah, I might as well tell you now: that goal fell apart yesterday.

I wanted to meet Robin Williams.

Love and condolences to the Williams family, close friends, business associates and all who had the good fortune to know Mr. Williams personally. The world just became a whole lot less fun.

I need to find a good place to burn this.

Soup Night 3, and a tribute

Tonight we're hosting another Soup Night at our place. Still only the vaguest idea how many people will show up, but we'll see. Three full-on soups, one bonus leftover offering, and who knows what else. I have great hopes for a good time.

We'll also raise a bowl of soup to absent friends, specifically to Gretel and to Andy Macauley, whose remembrance service was held today in the Shropshire hills.

Through correspondence, blog-reading and package-swapping with Gretel over a few years, Captain Midnight and I also got to know her partner Andy. He was a tall, gentle-natured Northerner with a fondness for crime novels and local pubs, alt-rock and punk bands, and Dove Promises (and a tendency to make them disappear from packages). Gretel's blog revealed him as a backyard gardener, a long-time member of the Eynsham Cricket Club, a game tea-lady for charity, a meanderer through the English countryside, and quite obviously a man who loved her to distraction.

Back in art school.

Tuesday would have been his 42nd birthday.

Tonight we will imagine him here, seated near the window, long legs stretching out under the dining room table, with a bowl of chicken corn soup and a chunk of bread, listening to the babble of conversation and occasionally making wry comments. I think he might have enjoyed that.