Five Years

Five years ago today, the world changed, for me and Anita and all the people who knew and loved Katie.

And there isn’t much more to say than that. People often say something “changed my world”, but what they usually really mean is just that it was a big deal, not that it had permanent impact.

Our lives really did change that day. Katie was our daughter, our student, our niece, our cousin, our friend. She was a bright light, a force of nature. Every day we get up and go about our business, and on a good day we don’t spend too much time missing her, although not doing so also feels wrong, like a betrayal. But we don’t forget.

We sometimes manage to go longer periods without thinking about her because time has scabbed over the wound. It hasn’t healed—it will never heal—but there is a scab there, one that anniversaries like this pick at, breaking bits loose. And like picking at scabs when we were kids, it hurts but also feels good, because she was so important to us.

I know she’d appreciate the following, one of many underrated Davy Jones tracks:

We've got five years, stuck on my eyes
We've got five years, what a surprise
We've got five years, my brain hurts a lot
We've got five years, that's all we've got

                        — David Bowie, Five Years

People who knew me or Katie would often meet the other and after only a few minutes, look at us and say, "OK, you're definitely related", based on our warped senses of humor.

And I kept coming across things this weekend that Katie wold have liked:

 I can't imagine what the rest of that book is like, but I'd like to see it!

Then there's this:

(OK, looks like Blogger won't let me show that picture, perhaps a copyright issue; try http://themetapicture.com/i-had-my-suspicions/)

Nice mixture of Sesame Street and Dr. Seuss there. Not an easy mashup to justify, but this one manages.

And finally, I was listening to CBC yesterday on XM, to a program talking about radicalization (apparently Canada, with a tenth the population of the U.S., has more people heading over to fight with ISIS than the States, which is bizarre). A caller was trying to sound reasoned and said, "I'm not just talking about radical Islam: there are radical separatists, and radical animal rights people, and radical Buddhists..." and I thought, "Radical Buddhists?! What do they do, tell you 'Become one with everything or...don't'??" (Actually it turns out he was right, there are radical Buddhists—who knew?)

Miss ya, kid.

Temporal Dislocation

I was coming home the other night from an errand. Steely Dan Pretzel Logic was playing, and I passed a house near us that has a large, lit star up in a tree. It must be five or six feet in diameter, and they’ve put it up at Christmas for as long as I can remember—at least 15 years. I suspect they’ve replaced it at least once during that period.

Anyway, having of course just been through stores full of holiday cheer, and hearing one of Katie’s favorite songs, and seeing that familiar star—for a few seconds I thought I was heading home to my family.

Here’s hoping it guided a few folks home for the holidays.

Echoes

It was 71F here yesterday, and is supposed to snow tomorrow. I know exactly what Katie would say: "On average, the weather is about normal for this time of year!"

The other day I came across a box of foil sheets from Price Club (OK, "Costco", but we still call it Price Club). Being my father's son, I had written the date we opened it on top (so we'd have some idea how long a box lasted):
     02/20/05
Next to the date, in Kt's handwriting:
     2:06PM
Classic.

Four Years

Four years ago today I woke up to a different world. People say that all the time—after 9/11, after an election—and usually it's not really true. And it wasn't true that day for most people, but for a small set of us, it most certainly was. The day before had been a normal fall day, cool, partly cloudy, and blustery; now it was cold, dark, and menacing. I stumbled out of bed that morning and stared into the bathroom mirror, wondering whether this was real.

Well, it wasn't a dream. And here we are, 1462 days later. Thanks to Facebook, we've had the pleasure of watching most of Katie's friends go on to great things: graduation, jobs, love, marriage. And this is great to see, despite the obvious “What ifs” that arise.

My sister wrote, “It doesn’t get any easier to believe”, and that's precisely accurate. But we persist, and remember her in our hearts, now and forever.

Visiting Old Haunts

I was up in Ontario last weekend, meeting my sisters to spread my mom’s ashes in the cemetery where we spread my dad’s eight years ago. It was a good trip: I saw lots of friends, and of course spent a good amount of time with my sisters and brother-in-law.

While there, we drove around old haunts—always a fun time—including the neighborhood where we lived when we first moved to Canada in 1969. That included the ex-houses of friends I haven’t seen in decades, including that of Steve Sprung, who was my best friend in grades 3 and 4 (as they say in Canada—always “grade 3”, not “third grade”!). After grade 4, we moved across town, and while we remained good friends and had sleepovers once in a while, we didn’t move in the same circles, or go to the same Senior Public (“middle”, in U.S.-speak) or high schools, so we didn’t see each other that often. I suppose in this modren era, we’d’ve emailed and IMed and Facebooked, but this was the 1970s!

Steve’s uncle worked at the University of Waterloo, in the same department where I worked from 1980–1986. Sometime in late 1981 or early 1982, someone—I forget who—told me that Steve had died. I asked his uncle, and he said yes, that Steve was driving in the countryside alone, on a sunny day, and lost control of his car. No sign of alcohol or drugs: just a mysterious, sad accident.

A few years later—obviously before I left K-W in 1986—I was in a store and ran across Steve’s dad. He recognized me and said, “You’re Philip, right?” I confirmed that, and, realizing who he was, managed to mumble something about being sorry to have heard about Steve’s death. I remember that he kind of stared at me and didn’t say anything else. I filed that in the “incomprehensible but clearly not meaning to be nasty” file and (almost) forgot about it.

Until this past weekend, when it suddenly surfaced in my brain, and I realized that I know exactly what he was thinking: “Why are you standing there, while my son is dead?”

I looked him up on the web: he passed on in 2002, and is buried next to Steve—in the same cemetery where we spread my parents’ ashes. I know that there was nothing I could have said to him then, or now, that would have helped; I’m just glad that I had the presence of mind to have acknowledged his loss.

Found Fragments

Moved a piece of furniture in the basement that hasn't been touched in years and found a broken guitar string and a hockey shin-pad strap behind it.

And in a box of papers, I came across this:

Someday, I figure, I’ll travel the world —
Guitar on my back, shoelace wrapped ’round my wrist,
And figure out if we can ever escape
This microcosm of rhetorical answers.

But for now, I’ll hoist my backpack,
Hug my parents, take 50 to 66 to 123
And dive back into the world
Where people know my name.

And continue wondering if Pilate
Was just really unlucky.