Ich Liebe Dich!

Well, we are having a beautiful fall on PEI so far.  The weather has been great.  Andrew has moved into an apartment downtown and seems to be doing well.  He stops in for family dinners from time to time and he and I go to lunch now and again.  Daniel is having a busy semester at UPEI, but he leaves for New York on Wednesday to attend Comic-Con.  Vicki is doing really well in school in her last year of high school.  Our goal is to help keep her focused this year so that her marks allow her to go to university or college. 

I am involved in another play.  The Laramie project is a heavy documentary about the killing of a gay man in the late 1990's.  It is a very powerful play and allows me to play a variety of characters which will help broaden my range.  Really looking forward to it. 

This is just a short update as 3 things happened consecutively over the past week that reminded me that life is short, and I thought I would capture it here.

September 28 would have been Winston's 43rd birthday.  I thought about him a lot that day realizing that he won't have the opportunity to celebrate anything ever again.  It made me think of a couple of lines from the poem they read on Remembrance Day, 'For the Fallen',

                      They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
                      Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

Winston will forever be 42. 

On September 29, Billy Pineau turned 43.  I have such amazing memories of his "birthday week" in Mexico, and know that he is currently in the middle east, I thought I would put together a compilation video of his various birthday surprises.  It went over pretty well.  Good times. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbBTTZPdhg0

Such a juxtaposition between Winston & Billy in all sorts of ways, but mostly in that one is here and one is not.  It made me think of the old saying "Tell someone you love them today, because life is short.  But SHOUT it at them in German, because life is also terrifying:  ICH LIEBE DICH!"
I've always loved that saying, because it is true.  Life is terrifying.  What determines that Billy will get more birthdays, but Winston does not. 

The final thing that happened, was on September 28, Tim Lynch's father, also named Tim Lynch passed away at the age of 82.  We went to his wake on October 2.  He lived a great life and was a man with a great spirit and a zest for life, although he was quite ill and confused over the past couple of years.  My favourite story involved Tim Sr. was when we attended Catherine Lynch's wedding.  In a kitchen full of women and myself, Tim went around the room taking drink orders.... he looked at each woman and said "Tea?', "Tea?", "Tea", and then he looked at me and said, in no uncertain terms "Whiskey!"  It was not a question, but a statement.  He then poured me a full tumbler of whiskey.  Tim Junior then walked in and looked at me and said "You let Dad pour you a drink?  What were you thinking?"   Great memory.

I was trying to find a way to pull these three events into some kind of tangible lesson to remind myself of both the good and the bad that life has to offer.  As cheesy as it sounds, the main message that I keep coming back to is from Ferris Bueller:  "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around for awhile, you could miss it!"