Happy Halloween

 I've been too busy lately.  How many times have you heard me say that? 

M has been insisting, for oh, about 3 years, that I fix the gargoyle and get it back up on the roof. 

I've had best intentions year after year, but never got around to it. 

This year I did it, with the help of a friend.  The poor gargoyle had been chewed really badly by mice.  Add to that, the chicken wire he was formed with was starting to fall apart. 

His neck, both wings and a leg were broken.  I would need to strip him down to the wires and re-build him.  That is not a quick or easy task, thus me putting it off for years.

So this year I re-wired his broken appendages and put a piece of PVC pipe in his neck to reinforce the chicken wire.  The problem is that chicken wire isn't that sturdy and once you add on layers of newspaper, plaster and paint, the form starts to sag.  

Well, I did most of the work, but a friend spent a couple hours with me last weekend and helped plaster half his body, so that lightened the workload, and now the gargoyle is back on his perch on the porch roof, complete with glowing eyes and mouth, just in time to scare little children for Halloween.  Happy Halloween!

Contemplation

I am finding myself in a quiet place in my head right now. I am contemplating the death of a friend, not terribly close, but he was a gem of a man, so sweet, funny, a great husband and father. There was so much life in him, that his sudden departure is leaving a lot of us around him, breathless with the shock. I don't have to make sense of this, death doesn't have to make sense, it just is. I know why he died, medically it makes perfect sense as well. What doesn't make sense is why him, why now. Why didn't death stop for the drug dealer, the child molester, the murderer? Why take such a wonderful person and leave behind those causing so much damage? That's an age old question, without an answer, because as I said, death doesn't have to make sense, it just is, and it is inevitable. Before our friend died, I'd been thinking about death for a few days. My thoughts and his death were totally unrelated. I remember thinking at the time, "why am I dwelling on death?" Is something about to happen, am I sick? Then I decided it was just me slowly becoming acquainted with my own mortality. I am realizing that I am in the last half of the book of life and death is now not just some distant thing that will happen, it's now gaining on me. Oh I realize I am probably decades away from it, it's just now becoming a real presence in my life. I am no longer young, immortal, carefree and too busy to contemplate the big picture. So I am sitting in my head, thinking, wondering, watching the horizon, looking out for death.

Caught on tape

My sister-in-law caught us on tape in the Letterman audience.  

Melanie is in the purple shirt and my orange shirt looks yellow next to her.

Trip to Bountiful

We went to see Trip to Bountiful tonight, starring Cicely Tyson and Vanessa Williams.  The acting was wonderfula and Ms. Tyson was funny and moved like a much younger woman.

Honeymoon in New York City

Whee!  We got to watch a taping of the Late Show with David Letterman.  Tom Selleck was the guest. It will air Friday night.  We were sitting in the left section of the audience, on the aisle, toward the back. See if you can pause it when it airs and find us.  I was wearing an orange t-shirt.

For CK

The library of the St. Florian Monastery in Austria. Photo: Getty Images