Thursday

I haven't been writing much lately, because frankly, I don't have much to write. Days go by. I wake up, go to the Cup, go to lunch. I come home and sit in the back yard awhile. Sometimes I go to the store and buy bird seed.

Feeding the birds reminds me of summers with my grandmother. I always looked forward to staying with her. She had a huge front yard, and jays, robins, sparrows and cardinals would come visit. Grackles were not common here then as they are now.

My grandmother once found a female cardinal with a broken wing. She brought the bird in and put it in a cage to protect it from dogs and cats. It lived as a pet for another two years.

My grandmother didn't feed the squirrels like I do. You can tell which squirrels in the neighborhood come to my back yard because they're all fat. I believe in leaving no squirrel behind.

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We've had some tragedy in my neighborhood recently. I wrote previously about Josh, the handyman with the economics degree who took his own life a few weeks ago. Last Friday, we lost Jeremy. Those of you who live here in my town read the news about the young man who was shot dead in an apartment complex parking lot for however much money a pizza delivery man carries on him. That was Jeremy. Like Josh, he had previously worked at the coffee shop. Like Josh, he had a lot more going on in his life than the nature of his second job might lead you to believe.

Josh and Jeremy were both in their mid-twenties, and shared more or less the same circle of friends — a lot of folks for whom sudden loss is still a mostly unfamiliar experience.

Although I've never lost a friend to deliberate violence, I'm at the age where several of my friends have died suddenly and prematurely — heart attacks, leukemia, traffic accidents, drug overdoses. And I saw enough aftermath of violence as a reporter to know that there is a crazy/violent subculture out there, which some, like Jeremy, have been unfortunate enough to encounter first-hand. (Of course, there are other people who don't bump into it unknowingly, as Jeremy did, but seek it out — witness the Tulsa woman who traveled to south Louisiana to be murdered at her own Ku Klux Klan initiation.)

The older you get, the more aware you are of your own frailty and mortality, and that of your friends and loved ones. And when you hear that someone you know has died, of whatever cause, the less surprised you are. You already know what the sense of loss feels like; it's no longer new terrain. You recognize the stages of grief as they come, and maybe even learn to fast-forward through a few.

That's not wisdom... it's just part of the experience of getting older.

By the time she was my age, my grandmother — the one who adopted the injured cardinal — was reading the obituaries every day.