I’m not up to writing much .. and this flu has put me in a pretty low mood. I had another high fever night last night . I woke up absolutely drenched in  sweat for the  2^nd night in a row.. tonight Diane has suggested I sleep on a pile of towels.   I did wake up today feeling a little better.. by midday, though, I  was back down with fever.. This time not so high.. I stayed  low all day and started to help Max pull together some study flash cards  for his Art History exam. This is one of his make up exams from the work he missed at Pratt last semester. I spent the day leafing through his  3″ thick Janson’s History of Art.  This is the same book I used when I took the course 28 years ago.. I remember loving the course.. and sucking at it at the same time.  My professor Frau Dr. Benesch  (I lived in Austria then) told me I didn’t have an artistic mind.. Oh well..  

    As I worked, I found myself falling into a couple of the stories… It’s just amazing how many great pieces of ancient art and architecture were built in tribute to a lost son, daughter or spouse. I resonate so strongly  with this need to call out to the future… ‘here was my son’   So much beauty from so much sadness..  I even found myself crying over the story of  Pompeii .. (a  town name  so common to us that even MS Word knows how to spell it). When Pompeii was destroyed in the year 79 AD by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius froze in time a slice of the daily life and the art of ancient  Rome.. life  just suddenly stopped for the roughly 20,000 people who lived there.  It’s too melodramatic to say that our lives were ‘frozen’ the day Sam died.. Yet everything around us reminds us of that previous life.. pictures, music.. everything .. everything.  Today is moving along and finding a new balance… we have fun… we’re getting to be productive again.. at the same time.. nothing can replace the role that  Sam played in our  family..   and that’s  just going to be the way it is.

     Sometimes when I’m writing this blog I find myself backed into a corner. If I’m feeling low and write about what I’m feeling.. then I am worried that I’m bumming people out.   If  instead I try to force myself into someplace funny or newsy then I feel like I wasn’t being true to myself.. in which case.. why bother writing ?

     Well.. the last part of the day turned out to be better than the beginning. Gabe and Diane came home around 7:30 from Gabe’s first real Lacrosse practice (He’s # 5 in the midfield)  

 

Everybody seemed energized from being outside in daylight. Max had some productive time working on his Light Color and Design project.. which is something like:

Choose a shape… any shape.. then use that shape to portray each of the seven deadly sins using only instances of that single shape.. though you can change the arrangement, number and  color. That sounds hard !  Max also worked on a movie project for his English class at Champlain and managed to comb is hair straight for the part (Scott looks disturbed by the new hairdoo !)

 

We all came together for dinner at about 8:30. It was the first time we’d all eaten together in 2 weeks. We lit our Sam candle. . Max cooked some sort of scallop dish with lemon zest and garlic that was fabulous… (it was zesty !) .. just as the four of us were sitting down, Scott came in.. then Rusty showed up because his car broke down on our road. The table was full of people. It felt good. We spent the rest of the evening watching really funny/stupid movies on YouTube .

   Life is sometimes bleak.. and sometimes it’s full.. you never know Sam.. you never know..

 

-jc