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captainsblogAs another July gets ready to fade away into a steaming pile of Augustus gloop, it's important, this year especially, to look at some of the moments it's brought me and my family over the years. My parents' anniversary was July 24; this year would have been their 71st had either lived to see it. Last Sunday was Eleanor's birthday, a day spent with fun and frolic with friends here. Yet the more poignant Julian moments atop my mind right now are these two, each tied to an event from July of 1988.
----
My oldest sister was born on July 23, 1939. She would have been 69 this year. Instead, her 49th birthday 20 years ago this month was her last. (It is not lost on me, as I write this, that my next birthday will be my 49th.)
I've written about Sandy here before, in many contexts- family, music, and often, baseball, even though she knew little of the game. This post from 2006 talks about that. It begins with one of my earliest baseball memories, from (now) over 40 years ago, and ends with that final summer voyage to say happy birthday to her for the last time.
We'd seen her, under much happier and healthier conditions, ten months before that, at our wedding. She'd begun to fail- it was her liver, after a lifetime of heavy drinking and stress- but she set that aside for her baby brother and the new sister she adored. A few days before the wedding, our minister called with a favor; an RIT student had called the church and asked if she could "shoot" a wedding for a class project. We agreed, and blessedly so, for that fotog got more and better "keepers" from that day than the professional we'd had a hard time finding months before. This is one of those candid moments we remember Sandy by:
By the time of her 49th birthday, not even a year later, she could barely get out of bed, and was a fraction of herself in every way you could measure, except for those of love and companionship. She even encouraged us to carry through with other plans we'd made for the trip, and we wound up seeing our last regular season Met game together at Shea that day. The Mets lost, of course, to a Braves pitcher making his major league debut who is still pitching for them. Sandy never made it to the start of the 1989 season, but she lives on in the hearts of those who loved her, and the families whose lives she touched, and even in members of that family not alive at that time who may not have met her but will always reflect her.
----
That was 20 years ago minus four days. Let's jump eight days forward into the past, to 20 years plus four days from now.
Another weekend, this time back home in Rochester. Again, a road trip, but a shorter one that lasted much longer. We drove out to Hamlin, a cottage community on Lake Ontario's shore about a third of the way along between the Rochester and Buffalo areas, to pick out a kitten from Beep Beep's litter. Said mommy was "owned" (heh) by Eleanor's matron of honor, and we'd seen her around enough to be comfortable with any of her "kids" finally coming into our lives.
I'd never had a pet growing up. Eleanor had, but there were allergy issues, especially feline ones. We looked at six of them, all six weeks old. One stood out as alert but not too much of a holy terror. Female, as it happened. She purred. She played. She was ours.
We were short on the pictures of her in her early days, out of fear that the Allergy Monster would make us give her up, but this is one of the few from her first week home with us:
She wasn't all black; she had white markings across her chest and between her hind legs, looking almost bikini-like. We named her Esmeralda for reasons lost to history. She made every move with us after that, welcomed (sometimes begrudgingly) every new arrival we followed her with, became best of friends with the male playmate we got her nine months later, and was part of our daily lives for the next 18 years.
I wrote about her, too, in 2006, near the end of her days, here.
----
In the first of those two from 2006 linked to above, I looked ahead to more-or-less where we are now:
The fall of 2008 will also bring bittersweet thoughts. Bush will be gone, the Mets might be raising another banner, but that October will mark 20 years since Sandy left us. (If she really did; we always joked that the best reincarnation gig would be to come back as one of Sandy's cats, so maybe she pulled a fast one and came back as one of mine.) She's still part of our everyday memories, and our ways of thinking and speaking, and much of her lives on in her own kids, and now grandkids, and even in those of us here who she knew either briefly or not at all.
If she is inhabiting one of our cats, it's the female we got about a year before Esmeralda left us. She's not a clone by any means in appearance or habit, but she's affectionate and conversational and occasionally confrontational in ways that remind me of my dear oldest sib. We didn't get to name this one, as we adopted her at about 3 years of age, but it's telling that her name- Michele- is the same as the one Sandy chose to name her first child, not quite 40 years ago.
----
My oldest sister was born on July 23, 1939. She would have been 69 this year. Instead, her 49th birthday 20 years ago this month was her last. (It is not lost on me, as I write this, that my next birthday will be my 49th.)
I've written about Sandy here before, in many contexts- family, music, and often, baseball, even though she knew little of the game. This post from 2006 talks about that. It begins with one of my earliest baseball memories, from (now) over 40 years ago, and ends with that final summer voyage to say happy birthday to her for the last time.
We'd seen her, under much happier and healthier conditions, ten months before that, at our wedding. She'd begun to fail- it was her liver, after a lifetime of heavy drinking and stress- but she set that aside for her baby brother and the new sister she adored. A few days before the wedding, our minister called with a favor; an RIT student had called the church and asked if she could "shoot" a wedding for a class project. We agreed, and blessedly so, for that fotog got more and better "keepers" from that day than the professional we'd had a hard time finding months before. This is one of those candid moments we remember Sandy by:
By the time of her 49th birthday, not even a year later, she could barely get out of bed, and was a fraction of herself in every way you could measure, except for those of love and companionship. She even encouraged us to carry through with other plans we'd made for the trip, and we wound up seeing our last regular season Met game together at Shea that day. The Mets lost, of course, to a Braves pitcher making his major league debut who is still pitching for them. Sandy never made it to the start of the 1989 season, but she lives on in the hearts of those who loved her, and the families whose lives she touched, and even in members of that family not alive at that time who may not have met her but will always reflect her.
----
That was 20 years ago minus four days. Let's jump eight days forward into the past, to 20 years plus four days from now.
Another weekend, this time back home in Rochester. Again, a road trip, but a shorter one that lasted much longer. We drove out to Hamlin, a cottage community on Lake Ontario's shore about a third of the way along between the Rochester and Buffalo areas, to pick out a kitten from Beep Beep's litter. Said mommy was "owned" (heh) by Eleanor's matron of honor, and we'd seen her around enough to be comfortable with any of her "kids" finally coming into our lives.
I'd never had a pet growing up. Eleanor had, but there were allergy issues, especially feline ones. We looked at six of them, all six weeks old. One stood out as alert but not too much of a holy terror. Female, as it happened. She purred. She played. She was ours.
We were short on the pictures of her in her early days, out of fear that the Allergy Monster would make us give her up, but this is one of the few from her first week home with us:
She wasn't all black; she had white markings across her chest and between her hind legs, looking almost bikini-like. We named her Esmeralda for reasons lost to history. She made every move with us after that, welcomed (sometimes begrudgingly) every new arrival we followed her with, became best of friends with the male playmate we got her nine months later, and was part of our daily lives for the next 18 years.
I wrote about her, too, in 2006, near the end of her days, here.
----
In the first of those two from 2006 linked to above, I looked ahead to more-or-less where we are now:
The fall of 2008 will also bring bittersweet thoughts. Bush will be gone, the Mets might be raising another banner, but that October will mark 20 years since Sandy left us. (If she really did; we always joked that the best reincarnation gig would be to come back as one of Sandy's cats, so maybe she pulled a fast one and came back as one of mine.) She's still part of our everyday memories, and our ways of thinking and speaking, and much of her lives on in her own kids, and now grandkids, and even in those of us here who she knew either briefly or not at all.
If she is inhabiting one of our cats, it's the female we got about a year before Esmeralda left us. She's not a clone by any means in appearance or habit, but she's affectionate and conversational and occasionally confrontational in ways that remind me of my dear oldest sib. We didn't get to name this one, as we adopted her at about 3 years of age, but it's telling that her name- Michele- is the same as the one Sandy chose to name her first child, not quite 40 years ago.
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Date: 2008-07-27 08:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-27 08:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-27 10:23 pm (UTC)Hi, Ray!
Date: 2008-07-28 03:16 pm (UTC)