To Establish The Exact Beginning of the End is, like, Impossible

It has come to my attention that I am not entirely sure of what day, exactly, my life started. I was a red, wet little thing crying in the shock of oxygen on the twenty seventh day of September 1986, but there’s no possible way that my life truly started on that day. I would be mad, really, if it all started on a day I can’t even recall.

So maybe my life began in the splashes of my very first memory, a short clip long lost from the reel and lacking both date and dialogue. In it I am wearing a light pink puffy raincoat and sitting on my dad’s shoulders, in the night, in the rain, and he is running down the street. He runs through the puddles and the reflection of the streetlight is so awkwardly beautiful that I, as a 2 year old child, feel the compelling urge to store it somewhere in my undeveloped brain where I can never, ever loose it. And now, twenty one years later, I can almost accept this as the beginning of my life, as it involves both my father and something pink, but I’m not totally committed to this theory. I’m hesitant to call this the beginning of my life because I wasn’t, at the time, even aware that I had a life. I was ignorant to what it means to have one, and naive to the idea that one day it will be taken away from me.

And so maybe, on this basis, I have not yet experienced the first day of my life.

for poppy

"Poppy”, I said, breaking the calm and soothing silence of a fourth floor hospital room. I’d been watching the second hand on the clock move in a familiar and granted circle; it didn’t audibly tick in a loud, jolting way, the way it would in an office or in math class, it just glided calmly around itself smoothly, silently, effortlessly, endlessly. “Poppy, does time go fast or slow?” Poppy looked at me, and looked at the clock, and he watched as it sailed swiftly around and around and around. And through bright blue eyes I could see the fullness of his heart, the passion and pride for his wife and his children, the unparalleled gratitude for laughter and music and a dang good rack of sloppy barbeque ribs. I saw seventy-four fulfilled and brilliant years’ worth of giving, learning, discovering, and building. I saw, just then, all the reasons that this man has maintained a fortressed and irreplaceable place in my heart for twenty four years. “Kiddo”, he said, smiling in a twist of angelic adorability and deviant rascality- in that way only Poppy could smile, in that way we’ve all known and loved our whole lives- “time goes really fast, kiddo, when you think about it.” May we all learn from Poppy to find treasure in every smooth and silent second passed, and to Poppy, a man I miss deeply already, may you rest easy and free forever.