Another day of record breaking heat.. no one is moving quickly..Life feels kinda like reading a Faulkner novel… everything is slow and sticky.. the air is thick.. sounds are muffled, the hills dissapear in the distance..

At least it’s air conditioned at work.. but I think they shut that down

around 4PM on hot days to save energy.. by 6 it was in the 80’s in my

office..

I went outside at 6PM to find my car thermometer reading 10 degrees.. ok.. so it WAS in the sun.. but.. 106 ?.. It was 87 inside our house when I got home..  Houston was like this all the time.. but we had AC..

THe heat put me in a peaceful and open mood.. Somehow the world new I couldn’t be bothered with much today.. so it sent me some really interesting interactions with people.. .. Lots of talk about how people were feeling …

two of the meetings were worth noting here. I made two new friends today.. and both are members of ‘the club’.. The club I mean is of guys who have had children who have died… there are no meetings, no badges, no slogans.. just a shared common tragedy. No one tells you about the club.. you just wake up one day and you’re a member.  I have one friend.. a club member who says it’s the club with the highest dues . The first guy I met was John from NY.. he’d seen an article about my science outreach work in the CMU magazine. John does similar outreach work for his company.. We’d talked for about 10 minutes when I mentioned how Sam’s passing had made my outreach work. into a life mission. He stopped me and told me about his daughter Sarah who’d died at age 4 in 1999.. She was also an organ donor.. we talked for an hour.. we’ll talk again I’m sure..   The second guy is only a friend in the facebook sense so far.. Robert, a a friend  of a friend connected us.. He’s a high level tech visionary in the government.. and he lost his oldest son in 2008. I’ reaching out to him by phoen to see if he wants to talk..

I keep running into club members I find them by accident.. or friends connect me. This club takes care of it’s own..It’s easy to talk to other guys who’ve been through loss like this.. the funny thing is.. we don’t usually talk about our loss loss..just at the begining.. then we go on to talk about other things, family, work , life..  it’s just a big piece of very regrettable common ground.   One thing that always comes up is ‘mission’.. I’m finding that loss often drives guys ot find a mission.. some way to turn work into healing.. arbeit macht frei

Anyway,, here’s to the other members of the club out there.. i think of you all every day..

night folks.. night sam
-me