Today was beautiful.. The Valentine’s day snowstorm lasted until early this morning. .by the time it ended we had between 3 and 4 feet of snow. This is more snow than I remember having in the last 10 years. It’s surreal.  Everything has come to a graceful halt. All the world’s sharp edges are rounded by the snow cover. Sounds are muffled. What little traffic there is slow and quiet. People are off from work, kids are off from school. Appointments are canceled.  I know it may sound funny, but the post storm lull reminds me of the period we had for the several weeks after Sam died.. Everything slowed down.. all the things that kept us so busy before and were so central to our life just pulled away. Looking back, everything seemed kind of muffled and gauzy. On our walk this afternoon Diane and I were talking about another parallel between the snowstorm and our own lives now..    We are realizing that you have turn into and face our grief just like you sometimes have to brave a storm. You just have to go through it…just keep shoveling. You can sometimes find beauty in it as well: today we found that someone had put flowers in the ‘Guitar Sam’ sculpture despite the deep snow..

      We braved the snow tonight to go see an absolutely fantastic State Radio show at Higher Ground. State Radio is a band out of Boston that does both fun and socially conscious music. They were able to make it up from Boston.. but their back up band was not That went a double set from State Radio which suited us all just fine. There were so many of Sam’s friends at the show. I think we took up about a quarter of the packed room. I felt so welcome at the show.. The crowd just parted for me when I went down on the floor. I’d like to think that they knew I was connected to Sam.. but it just might have been because I’m a spooky old guy wearing my son’s (max’s) blinking tweed jacket.

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At one point Chad, the lead singer dedicated the song ‘Keepsake’ to Sam. That had me dancing and crying at the same time. .. Max and I tossed some Sam buttons up on stage and all three band members put them on.   Hree’s a picture of Chad with his Sam button on.

We also passed them some SamStones to toss around on their tour. After the show, the band was passing out material about the situation in Sudan. I love their spirit. It was a great, great evening.. and I felt you  there with us smiling tonight,  Sam.

-jc