Remembering 4/1/2013 on 4/1/2018

I haven't been to Prophet or Madman since June of last year. Since then, I've done most of my posting at Bookended by Cats or directly on Twitter. But an anniversary like this moves me to reflect. Five years ago today, April 1 was on a Monday. Easter Monday. It was also my 19th and final day at the Cleveland Clinic with my folks. I would leave on Tuesday (4/2) and return to work on Wednesday (4/3). Dad was stabilized, the doctors were no longer looking for a proverbial silver bullet, and there was a plan to move Dad from the ICU to a Clinic rehab unit and then ultimately to a care facility closer to home. At the time, this felt like a good outcome. It felt like progress. As I look back upon this event with the ... benefit(?) ... of hindsight, knowing what was to come in just over a month, it might be easy to take a darker view of this memory. It can be tempting to connect the news received on that day with the supposed nature of the calendar date itself. So, yes, the irony of receiving hopeful, yet ultimately false, news on April Fools’ Day is not lost on me. But no one, whether in the Clinic or beyond it, was conspiring to deceive us on that day. There was no endgame or "gotcha" moment in mind. Everyone involved was dealing with the best information they had at that time, and there was cause to be hopeful. There was a very real possibility that Dad would make at least some kind of recovery. In the wake of what happened, was that false hope? No. What came later cannot mar the hopefulness and slight relief I felt on this day five years ago. Even though I'm still saying ... #GoodbyeDad. (If you want to read my 4/1/2013 FB post that sparked this reflection, the full text is posted after the jump.)

A Tribute to Fallen Soldiers

The best tribute to those who have fallen in service to this country is quite possibly the poem "Letter to Saint Peter" which was written by Elma Dean in 1942 and later adapted into a song by John Gorka ("Let Them In" from his 2001 release, The Company You Keep).

This video has John Gorka's song set to a collection of moving images. Very appropriate for Memorial Day.

Memory is a Funny Thing

My lunchtime excursion today took me through a residential area where I had to wait for a small construction vehicle to clear the road. As I sat there, my car the last in a row of similarly waiting cars, I just watched the wind blow leaves across the street and sidewalk. Somehow that sight reminded me of elementary school, specifically the elementary school library. I almost felt as though I were sitting in that library again. I'm not sure why that is -- it's not as though I can recall a library trip that had me sitting close enough to the windows that I could watch a similar scene. But we are in Autumn, and I did spend a fair bit of my time window-gazing in my youth, and the street across from the school did feature a row of homes.

Memory is a funny thing.

Image courtesy of the web. 

Photo by Suzanne Tucker