On this day forty-eight years ago…

In the spring of 1977 I was in the early prime of my teenage years; she was in the latter prime of her teens.

Life was stretched out before us like a long, hot summer with an endless amount of options- of opportunities and roads to be traveled.

Could she imagine that [on that beautiful spring day] that she’d never see summer?

I don’t think so, I know I couldn’t.

Did anyone predict a (legally blind) man would be driving a little too fast in a residential area?

No, none of us could foresee the future on that dreadful day of the accident.

Nor could we ever have envisioned the short days ahead.

The hazy hours of hope and disbelief and denial until …

Until there was nothing left to do but mourn.

Oddly enough (or not) I still mourn.

The grief is not near as raw and not quite as heart wrenching as it was forty-eight years ago.

It’s more like a constant dull throbbing you learn to live with and usually ignore …

But sometimes it sneaks past the smiles and laughs of grandchildren, family and friends.

Sometimes the grief creeps in among life, among the daily routines…

and all I can do is sit with the bittersweet memories.

This personal little tidbit is what inspired the writing of Odd Man Out, a short story that can be found in the collection Once Upon a Dead Gull. Or read it in the larger story collections of More or Short Stories & Such.

Except from Odd Man Out

My mother used to say I never met a stranger. I reckon she was right but that didn’t keep me from feeling like a foreigner.

I was the peculiar child that didn’t look quite like the others; a raucous summer born among winter babies. I cared too much and cried too easy and sometimes I forgot that I wasnt everybody’s mother.

Happy Friday Y’all