Remember

Right now, in 2000, I was getting off the phone with my grandmother. We were making arrangements to go to a Baby Shower what was then the next day, and my family had just finished eating a healthy dinner of Taco Bell. My mother said, "hey, lets go surprise her." We immediately got in the car and drove the maybe six minutes between our house and hers. It seems there was little traffic that day, and so we likely made it in under five. When we got there, she was dead.

That was nine years ago.

Because of that, and the many other family deaths which tend to fall in September, my family sometimes instead calls it "Remember," and not in the Fantasticks kind of way of "Try to remember the kind of September when no one wept except the willow," but the type of remember where you stop to cherish those who have passed, those who still are alive, and remember them in meaningful ways. Tonight, that meaningful way is having cooked one of my grandmother's favorite dishes. Overboiled spaghetti mush. Mmmm. like licking a plastic spoon, but somehow, for a moment, it's almost like she's at the table, grousing about the blandness of the sauce with the rest of us. ;-)

I hope your September has been full of *good* and *warm* and *blessed* memories.