Remember the picture of the day lilies last week?  Here they are just one week later.

LOOSE GRAVEL

Remembering a time when I had the world by the tail and a downhill pull… age eleven, I think, maybe ten… riding my bicycle downhill on a dirt road between Glenwood and Roseboro, Arkansas… giving two younger cousins a ride… I was standing pumping, Dwayne was on the seat behind me and Grady was on the passenger platform behind the seat… The world was wonderful and green, the road stretching out before us eternally… a war had been raging in Europe and in Asia… I guess I knew people had been dying...were dying, but I don’t remember “feeling” anything about the dying of people somewhere in a world I didn’t know yet.  The war was over and everybody who wasn’t a kid talked constantly about “our boys” coming home, and we knew they weren’t boys but men who were making their way back from what seemed to us a fog of exciting horror coming back to mysterious joys that we didn’t know how even to imagine… Death at a distance wasn’t real the way my Grandpa’s dying had been real because I had seen him on the morning of the day he died. He smiled and even laughed in spite of the war with his three sons in it, two in Europe and one in Texas… he ate breakfast and lunch and talked as if nothing would ever change.  He didn’t see death coming later in the day to zap him as surely as bullets on that same day killed people in the war…he had slept at our house the night before and had eaten breakfast at our table, joking and laughing and teasing the way he always did before going back home to where Granny expected him to live forever… he gave no sign that he saw death coming, crumpled, wilted like a spent day lily in his place across the dinner table from my Grandmother and that was the end of it… by the time we got to Pine Ridge the undertaker had removed him from the light and life of his house into a long black car which drove away as soon as we got there as if admitting that’s it… it’s finished… time to go get him ready for whatever happens after living is finished…but Grand Dad died in the middle of the time of war and the bicycle ride down the hill on the gravel road was sometime after the war ended… and the reason I got myself into this little bit of rambled writing is that just this week one of our neighbors and best friends had an unexpected, some would say “freak” accident a few days ago, and although she’s a very healthy, very strong person, she’s going to be laid up for a awhile recovering instead of going about doing things the way she has always done them; and thinking about that interruption for her, although there was no dirt or sand or gravel on the pavement where she fell, the thought that came into my head was that she has hit a patch of gravel, which is what happened on that bicycle ride a very long time ago that laid me up for a whole summer when I got to the bottom of that hill on the dirt road with my cousins behind me on the bike we hit a patch of loose sand and gravel and the front wheels of the bike went completely out of control and the next thing I knew we were skidding through dirt and sand and gravel with the bike on top of me and Dwayne on top of the bike and Grady on top of Dwayne with my head down face first and because it was summer I wasn’t wearing much in the way of clothes so I was scraped raw and my right knee cap was laid almost bare to an extent that just about everything that I had thought I’d be doing all summer couldn’t be done, so you can see why when I heard about my good neighbor’s falling interruption of summer plans I remembered that morning and the unexpected loose gravel that laid me up…

View from the tenth floor of Scripps Mercy Hospital... UCSD Hospital in the background...