Have a good Memorial Day.
I press “send” and we leave suburban Denver and my oldest granddaughters wedding on Friday June 4.
All such events are significant. This wedding is far more so than most for me.
Lindsay’s grandma, my first wife, Barbara, died at University Hospital, Minneapolis, when her Dad, my son, was 1 1/2, July 24, 1965. She was essentially terminally ill (kidney disease) during our entire marriage of just over two years. She was only 22. Her need for a kidney transplant then is why I live in the twin cities today. She didn’t live long enough to get a kidney. Had she received the transplant and lived, she would have had to stay here as the possibility of organ rejection was monitored. In those years, they were doing transplants, but the process was very new, and done in only a few hospitals in the U.S. University Hospital was one of those few.
Time flies. This last week I’ve been out taking photographs of the places I/we used to live in this area. I’ll deliver them to my son and granddaughter in a few days.
Tom and my first home after Barbara died was at 1615 S. Ferry St. in Anoka, just a block from the Mississippi Bridge. It has always been there, just a small very old house alongside a very busy road. Sometime between my last visit and yesterday it was torn down and replaced by two houses set back behind a fence which probably serves a function as road noise barrier.
Properly, the address, 1615 S. Ferry St., which we knew as just another old house, was long past its prime, even then badly needing rehabilitation.
Nonetheless, for some reason you understand, I don’t look at it in quite the same way.
I wrote a short letter to Lindsay which I’ll give her when I get to Colorado. I suggest that she call up John Lennon’s “Beautiful Boy” on YouTube. That’s the song with the lyric, “life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans”. Take your pick of versions.
We humans face a quandary every day: look to saving the future, obviously; but live as well as possible today, as well.
Life, indeed, is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.
But one is cautioned to not neglect or dismiss the future either…the generations which follow deserve our very serious attention to that as well.
That is a job, I have observed, that we do not do well….