What a beautiful day. Diane and I took a quick snow shoe this morning in brilliant sun. I got back just in time to make a call with my friend ‘S’ from Bangalore India. S and I have been friends for a couple of year’s. I only recently learned that her brother died unexpectedly last spring. We’d exchanged a few notes, but I really wanted to get together to talk about our losses and healing. We spent about 45 minutes taking about Sam, her brother, our families, and our healing. It was really good sharing stories, good and bad about how we and our loved ones were doing. We talked for a long whole about our paths back into work.. and the difficulties that was still presenting us both. Everyone’s story is different.. even so, there are many parallels in our paths through loss and healing even though we live  in very different cultures on opposite ends of the earth  .

   I decided to work at home today which was pretty relaxing, even though . I had a pretty full work day. One great thing about working at home is that you can do other stuff while on conference calls… Other things like taking pictures of the aliens in your wooden ceiling 

  The day passed very quickly. Before I knew it was dinner time. Diane and some friends were headed to a movie so I grabbed Max and Gabe and took them to Bridge Street for dinner.  It’s always fun going there.. we always run into many folks we know.

We headed home around 7:30 to intercept my good friend Kerry, his son Mike and Mike’s friends Connor and Jack. Kerry had told me he was coming by because Mike and his buddies had ‘something’ to give us. Well, that ‘something’ was a box filled with donations to Sam’s fund. The boys had organized a 3 way birthday party in the Underhill town center.   Instead of asking for gifts, they’d asked their friends to consider making donations for Sam’s fund instead. They’d hired a DJ (Bucky B) and stuck a donation box with Sam’s picture. By the end of the night with over $800 !!!   (The floor even collapsed !)

It was such a moving and generous thing for these kids to do. In honor of their generosity.. I offered to eat a spoon of peanut butter, A1 sauce and whipped cream…Believe me, it didn’t taste as good as it sounds….

After Kerry and the boys left, I went out to the lab and made another blinking beer tray… This one is blue.

 I’m hoping to trade it for an extra ticket to tomorrow night’s Keller Williams show at Higher Ground so I can take a friend. I’ve already traded one of these things for entry to a show..   Should be a great show.. see you there Sam !

-jc

It’s Monday evening on the first day of the winter school break. It’s pretty quiet here tonight. Gabe is at a friend’s. Max is downstairs working. We have many quiet evenings now. They can be nice and quiet .. or sad an quiet. It depends on what else is going on.  Monday night is Yoga night here. Diane teaches a class at 6 in the barn. She usually has between 10 and 18 folks show up. I am absolutely hooked on Diane’s classes.. (I’m absolutely hooked on Diane too) . She is a wonderful and interesting teacher. The class always has something new with a nice mix of hard work and relaxation.   Yoga is a great physical and mental release for me. I have not had a yoga class since Sam died that didn’t bring me to tears at some point.. Sometimes its from my tight hamstrings.. Sometimes it’s memories. Tonight I managed to fall into such a deep relaxation during Savasana (meditation) that my snoring woke everyone else up…

    After Yoga, Diane Max and I had a nice quiet dinner. It’s really good just to have some time with Max. We were all talking about how much older and wiser we’ve become in the last 3 months. I can see him growing so much . What a great and sensitive kid. I am so thankful that he decided to take Spring semester here with us. I  can’t imagine how it would have felt to have him back down in NY so soon.

    I’m going to try to get to bed early tonight and read. I’ve been reading a book called ‘Swallowed by a Snake’ by Thomas R. Golden.  My friend Craig, the guy who is helping start the group Father’s Forever I talked about in  an earlier post. turned me on to the book.  It’s subtitled ‘the gift of the masculine side of healing’ .  By ‘masculine side’ Golden doesn’t mean just men.. he acknowledges that both genders have masculine and feminine sides.  The main premise is that guys have different ways of dealing with grief than women.. (no surprise) . Golden points out that men may have more trouble expressing their grief than women because societal expectations.. or their own expectations on themselves. Even though I’m getting pretty tired of reading grief and healing books, this book has some useful insights..
The title ‘Swallowed by a Snake’ comes from a story Golden tells about a village which sis being terrified by a giant snake.  The snake is so  powerful that no man had ever fought it and survived..  A guy offers to kill the giant snake. Instead of fighting the sanke directly.. he allows himself to be swallowed whole along with his knife and a bag of food. Once inside the snake he takes out his knife and cuts away at the belly of the snake a little more each day. Eventually he reaches the snake’s heart and kills it .. he then slips out of the snake and returns to the village triumphant..   It’s a strange analogy which he uses throughout the book. The point is grief take a long time, is dark, it’s confining.. etc./ I’m not sure I completely resonate with that analogy.. but he does have one other analogy I like.. He says grief is like manure.. if you spread it around you can grow from it.. if you leave it all in one pile it just starts to stink. Now that’s an analogy I can use.. He said two other things that I thought were useful.. one.. he took issue with the notion that a loss like Sam’s pasing was like a wound that would heal.. he pointed out that such a deep loss was more like loosing a limb.. it never heals.. you just learn to accept it. The thing about loosing a limb is that it’s apparent to everyone. Our loss is invisible unless you know us. The other good point I took form the book is the view of grief as a guest.. Golden points out that we are  not our  grief.. it is something that is visiting us .. and will leave over time. He observes that many men get consumed by their grief and define themselves by it.. just as we define ourselves by the jobs we do. Golden also observes that men may need rituals more than women .. By that measure I must be doing fine. I have so many rituals to my daily bonding with Sam (how I put on my Sam button. Touching his pictures kissing the rock in the back yard, talking to him in the shower and the car, writing his name in the snow, writing this blog in his room, etc, etc). ,  that I sometimes feel i’m starting my own religion.   Maybe I am..   Sam.. I might  be your first disciple.. Namaste

-jc

 
Here’s picture Ivy took the other day of me with a newly placed SamStone  at Birch Glen Lodge. Thanks for the picture Ivis.

ps. I just got this video from our friend Scott. He’s putting a SamStone abou t30 feet up in a tree down at the end of US 1  in the Florida Keys

We woke up early this morning, dressed quickly and headed up the hill. to Jen and Tim’s to see the Teen News segment I was supposed to be on. It turns out that the web site info was wrong and it aired yesterday up here so we missed it. It worked out, though because we were able to hang out with Jen and Tim a little.  I noticed a little statue up there holding one of the Sam buttons.

 We ended up planning a short joint vacation to Killington with them for early next week. We really wanted to get away with Gabe.. so this will work out perfectly . After that was squared away. We noticed that there was water seeping in around Tim and Jen’s  sky lights.. looked liked and ice dam. Diane, Jen and I headed up on the roof and started shoveling off the snow. It was a hoot !. There was so much snow up there.. We were up to our waists!/  It was Nate’s birthday so we sang happy birthday to him from the roof

On the way down from Tim and Jen’s Diane and I were talking about how we now measure everything as before Sam’s passing and after Sam’s passing. It’s such a different world to us now. Memories made since Nov 21^st have a much more vivid and surreal quality to them than anything that happened before. Our worldviews are so shifted now.. We both have had thoughts of just selling everything.. and doing something like travel for a year.. We’re not ready to do that yet.. but we may actually think this through and do something like that eventually.. Sam’s death has taught us that there’s no good reason to be  tied down by stuff and responsibility.

 Gabe was up by the time we got home. Max had spent the night in town. Gabe really wanted to get outside and build a snow fort… Somewhere on the way to getting my snowpants on I ended up taking a nap (never leave your camera out where others can find it) .

  After my short snooze. Diane, Gabe and I headed out to build a fort. After scouting out a suitable sight we spent a sunny hour or so digging out some very fine tunnels and a not very fast luge run.. The need for speed eventually caused us to abandon the snow fort and head to the sledding hill. The sledding hill was born  about  12 years ago when a truck accidentally rolled part way down the hill after slipping out of park.   The resulting  100 foot chute is the finest sledding in Jonesville. Here’s Gabe demonstrating his technique..  Nice

Once we were good and frozen, we all headed indoors for tea and cocoa. My mom called to tell me that she’d managed to catch the elusive teen news program down in Boston. It turned out to be about a 3 minute segment with me talking about next generation game processor technology. She said it was good and promised to send me a copy. I think it’s amazing that everyone (camera crews, reporters, us) all  worked so hard for a 3 minute segment.. It gives you a hint at how much work goes into building up a news program.

    The evening is winding down now.. we had a nice dinner.. Diane is putting the final touches on a really  nice letter she is writing to the folks who received Sam’s transplanted organs..  We wanted them to know something about our Sam.. We hope they write back.. but they don’t need to..  Sam.. send these folks some love for us..

-jc

I slept late this morning and woke up to bright sunshine  at 9:30.  I guess I hadn’t realized how beat I was from a week of traveling. Gabe woke up right after me and we both shuffled downstairs.. As soon as we really woke up, we started working on Gabe’s  MySpace profile (http://www.myspace.com/gabriel_the_lizzard_eater  )  to add the pictures and movies from last night’s session at Green Mountain Gymnastics We all had such a blast there   Our friend Tim arraigned to  rent the whole place for a bunch of the Bolton snowboarding kids. Each kid chipped in a few bucks and they had the run of the place for the evening. The centerpiece of the place is a large (20 x 20 ?) pit filled with soft foam blocks. You can jump or fall into it just about anyway and come out unhurt. It was amazing to see the agility and confidence of all these kids.. front flips, back flips, gainers, corks… TNext time we go I’m going to work on my back flips.  Here’s Gabe doing a ‘gainer’ and a double front flip.

     After working on the Myspace.. Diane and I spent a some time helping Max get ready for his trip back to Pratt next week. He’s been working hard on the coursework needed to finish the courses he missed last semester. He hopes to go down mid week and finish of several of his classes. I’m going to try and help him prep for his art history exam.  Art History was the only ‘C’ I ever mad in college.. so It might not be a big help.

    Around 1, Diane and I went to see Priscilla, Tim and Ivy at the Yurt at Maple Wind Farm in Huntington Maple Wind Farm  has two of these large canvas Yurt’s out on the edge of some large pastures. Here’s what they look like..

I didn’t have my camera.. so this is a picture off their web page.. Please just imagine it’s us.
    Priscilla used to be one of our roommates in the schoolhouse back in the early 80’s Her daughter Ivy and Sam were friends when they were babies. They’d just started to link back up on IBM and MySpace when Sam died. Now Ivy and I talk on MySpace.
    It was Priscilla’s ‘virtual’ 50^th birthday this weekend and they had rented the yurt to host a party tonight. I say ‘virtual ‘ birthday because Priscilla’s real birthday was November 21^st.. the day that Sam died.. They decided to move the celebration  out in time  and this was the time. We found Priscilla, Tim and Ivy sitting around the woodstove in the Yurt. it was pretty cozy in there.. though they said it had been pretty chilly the night before (- 5 F and 30 mile and hour winds).  We all coaxed ourselves outside and took a  pretty fast 5+ mile snowshoe (almost) up to Molly Starks’ Balcony. The scenery and the snow were  gorgeous. It felt so good being outside. Being out in nature makes us feel closer to Sam..  The snow was amazingly deep. At one point our friends’ dog, Stella, fell off the packed track and got stuck in the snow. Tim had to fish her out..
   After the snowshoe, Diane and I headed back home. Max and I brought in firewood.   Every time I touch the wood I remember that Sam and Mason stacked it…memories are everywhere. 
   Around 6:30 all of us headed over to Max’s girlfriend Jessie’s house for her father John’s 50^th birthday (two in a day !). We had a really nice night with Jessie’s family. They are such nice people. There were quite a few kids over there so I did a few science experiments to liven things up. I did one of my favorites which is to take a wad of fine steel wool ad crimp iit in the hook of a stretched out coat hanger. You then light the steel wool and swing the whole thing around your head.. It looks like this:

My friend Bruce once made a move that looked just like this !.. It looks even cooler standing inside the ring of fire.

   Well. I gotta get to sleep. We’re going up to Tim and Jen’s early tomorrow morning to see if we can catch the ‘Teen News’ segment I’m supposed to be on.  I’ll be talking about the technology behind video games.  I’m not sure what kind of teen would be watching TV at 7:30 AM on a Sunday which is when it will air on  Burlington‘s Channels 5 and 31. For other cites please see the schedule at   www.teenkidsnews.tv . Sam.. try to watch !

-jc