tomorrow is all souls day. and today is the first day of my month of gratitude. i like to remember those souls who walked a bit with me on this path with gratitude for what they taught me.
grandpa w showed me the joys of rollerskating and a good baseball game and to always have a little mystery about you. (later in life i found out he was briefly married to a german circus performer before my grandma. cool.)
john b was the boy we all wanted to grow up and marry. he was devastatingly handsome even in the first grade (think donny osmond). he was funny and friendly. he blew his brains out with a rifle when we were nineteen. i have a vivid memory of side-by-side i-can-swing-higher contests on the playground. to this day when i swing, he swings.
leesha b just got her drivers license when she died in a head-on collision on a windy desert road at twilight. no matter how great it's going, it really can all be gone in a second. cherish it.
mark ran up all eight floors of the padre hotel and hurled his body off of an open balcony. everybody has demons, some big and some small. it's our job to work them out.
cece (not her real name) was a foster child on my caseload. she had stage four bone cancer. cece taught me that even though your tumors are growing so fast others can hear your bones breaking from the inside out and even though you know you are dying before you even get to live your life, having your toenails painted with glitter and talking about leo dicaprio can bring a smile to a girl's face.
there are others. too many others. i may return to this page and add on as i think about them throughout the week and remember the lessons they lived.
