Clearing Puddles

Four years ago, I was unemployed. Four years ago tomorrow, I got up in front of a crowd and told this story:

The Mind is a Funny Thing…

It’s funny how time does things to the mind. I’m not good with numbers, but for some reason, with some dates…I’m like Rainman.

I remember the birthdays of coworkers from several jobs ago mentioned in passing. I remember weird stories that the people who told them to me have long forgotten. Many moments of my own life are gone in a puff of whatever it is that comes along in a mind and steals memories forever, but I still remember how friggin’ impressed a guy named Eddie was to hear me mention in a speech in a college class that he liked muscle cars. (He’d only mentioned it in passing.)

So I suppose it’s weird that while certain dates ring out in my subconscious, charging to the front of my mind and screaming to be heard, that I forgot today is the 11th year my sister’s been dead.

A Sudden Reminder

I was reminded what today is when my wife mentioned it and I saw a couple notifications on Facebook from people reminding me that they were thinking about me today…

Because my big sister has been dead for years.

I feel no guilt, because I usually remember. (I would have come across 2/25 at work at some point today and it would have triggered the reminder.) It’s been a strange week: 10 years ago yesterday, I dodged brain surgery to have a tumor removed from my head. The tumor is still there, and I remember how terrified I was because it was almost 1 year to the day that a head full of tumors took my sister’s life.

I saw my mom share a poem on Facebook that my sister wrote years before she died. If you’re interested, it can be found in this post. I replied to my mom with the video above. My mom replied to me with this:

[I] remember how you two were such buddies in spite of the 5 year age difference. You really had some times and I can still see two little kids looking out the door at a soft night rain on more than one occasion, and announcing to me you were going for a walk. And off you’d go. Precious.

We were lucky to have a mom who let us walk in the rain at night…

I was lucky to have the sister I had..
.

Clearing Puddles

On those walks, we stomped in puddles and listened to the rain on our umbrellas (if we used them), or let it soak us to our cores. We had a job in the rain that we took very seriously: rainfall be damned, we’d do all we could to stomp in a puddle to see if we could clear it before it refilled. A downpour only meant we had to try harder. It’s the kind of thing kids do and adults don’t think about, but we proved that it could be done if you did it with the vigor of youth.

Once cleared, it was off to the next puddle in the night, my sister holding my hand because I was afraid of the dark well into high school.

But on those nights, the dark didn’t scare me. I knew I was safe as long as she was around…