I like these words put together:

You see I dream of many things,
Of floating, solitary kings,
Of pawns and people with blue sequins through their hair....
The jester sings, the bishop brings
The queen a hollow following;
And all the pawns and people stop, and people stare...


I think I have yet to find a more clever log entry than this [September 10th 2002]. It remains one of my all time favorite and proves that I am still a romantic at heart. I saved it when I first read it and sometimes I still go back and reread it.

There are a few things that cannot be packed away. Things which cannot disappear for deaths sake:

We have a stain our on library carpet. It is black and not obtrusive, though it would be if the sofa didn't cover it most of the way. It is there as a result from a spill of oil based black model paint. I think he was painting a plane.

In the downstairs bathroom, when you wash your hands you notice a yellow smiley face smiling up at you from the spigot. He opened the top of it and stuck the paper in there a few days before he died.

When you play Monopoly, there are three pieces of cardboard in the box, bearing his little block handwriting: Metateranian Ave. Baltic Ave. Indiana Ave. [misspelling his]. I guess those three real-estate cards were missing.

And I think that coat, which we've been wondering who it belonged to for so many years, is his. I found a picture of the four of them snowshoeing, and he is wearing it.

People say the memories fade, and I used to do mental exercises to prevent that from happening, but nothing has faded. Has it not been long enough? Did I live with him too long? I still can picture his face and his voice only takes a moment to recall. Sometimes I hear Joey come down the stairs and think it is him, but it's not, it's just that Joey has reached the age that he was when he died and his stature and awkwardness are a bit the same. He giggled a lot. None of us giggle. Do we? He did. His tiny shoulders, which didn't fit the rest of him, would shake and his eyes would crinkle at the corners, like mine I'm told, and he would belt out a small giggle.

No, the memories haven't faded. Because once someone has lived, and truly lived, that is putting yellow smiley faces inside the spigot head and hiding his toothbrush so well that it wasn't until a year after he died that we found it, they can never be erased. They can never be forgotten. There will never be any question in our minds as to what kind of brother, son and friend he was. He just was. And sometimes still is.