The Corners of My Mind

I almost made it through the whole day today before the filtering software kicked in, but no, at 2:10, I clicked on a news feed for Consumerist and I get the message that it was blocked due to "streaming media content." Funny, I had had about fifteen minutes free before I went to lunch, and I checked out lots of feeds, including from the Consumerist and from Digg ("personal webpages"), not to mention every blog/diary that posted an update.

A thousand monkeys typing on a thousand typewriters for a thousand years might not come up with Hamlet, but they could probably come up with a close approximation of the infrastructure of my school district's computer network.

In the meantime, there's confirmed H1N1 (which my eye reads as "high-nigh") flu in the school, four kids, two of whom are already back in school. If this is such a big public health issue, why does it take two weeks to get the results of the tests?

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In other news, this is a commemorative week for me, so to speak, much on my mind. I didn't write about it the last few days because it's been gelling, so to speak. Here's what happened seven years ago this week, a week that began, like this one, with Memorial Day weekend.

On Sunday, my mother died. My sister, my niece and I were in the hospital with her, holding her hands.

Due to the holiday the next day, we planned the graveside service for Wednesday. In the meantime, there was Memorial Day, which kind of slipped past us that year, but it's a day that's always been something to me other than a Monday off from work. More on that in a minute.

My cousin arrived from Colorado on Tuesday; she was very close to both my parents, especially my mother.

The graveside service was short, well-attended for something that we really didn't advertise at all. My father took everyone out for lunch afterward. About an hour later, my cousin got a call from her son in San Francisco that his wife had gone into labor (at about 29 weeks) and they were going to the hospital. His mother made a call, changed her flight to Denver the next day to one to San Francisco that evening, and took off.

The next day, Thursday, was May 30. It was my father's 83rd birthday, and of course, we had no way of knowing that it was the last birthday he would have. Not long after we woke up that morning, my cousin called to say that she was the grandmother of boy-girl twins, very premature, born on my father's birthday.

Memorial Day, to me, is always May 30th, even though it isn't anymore. It's always Jack's birthday; there are always parades in his honor (which is what his father told him when he was a little boy and saw Civil War veterans still marching every year.) It was always a day about soldiers, and so it was always a day about Jack, even before he knew he would one day be a soldier, and for years after he was. I marched in many a Memorial Day parade as a Girl Scout, and later, with my own daughters, as a Girl Scout leader. I was always marching for him, for his birthday, and for all the others who fought for us and didn't come home.

It was a real circle of life week for us all here, and still is, every year. Now Shirl and Jack are both gone, and on Saturday, the beautiful, blond, perfect twins will be seven. There are more parades for more soldiers. We are not marching these days, but we remember them and honor them, and Jack and Shirl, too, always.



watching FRIENDS :: ENTRY #2053
READING: American Lion: Andrew Jackson by Jon Meacham