Nine Years Ago

There are two milestones this week in my life relating to my parents. The obvious one is that of Mother’s Day—a day that everyone should recognize, particularly if your mother is still alive. As the southern humorist Lewis Grizzard used to say: “Every son should call his mother—I wish I could…” Lewis said this because his mother had died years earlier. Lewis, like most men, was a self described mama’s boy. So am I…

The other milestone is that today is the ninth anniversary of my father’s sudden death in 1996. I found out the news by talking to my mother on my cell phone while floating on my boat in a cove in the middle of a lake in South Carolina. My friends Rusty and Sharon and I were embarking upon celebrating Cinco de Mayo with a day of water skiing and otherwise useless behavior as most Americans are prone to doing when you have no worries in life. I haven’t celebrated Cinco de Mayo ever since that year.

How things can change in a heartbeat. I had to store the boat, return to Atlanta to pick up clothes and secure my cats, and eleven hours after the fact I was standing in my parent’s home in south Alabama. Our preacher and some other friends had stayed up with my mother to await my arrival. That was the longest seven-hour car trip I ever made in my life.

It’s hard to believe that it has been nine years and a lot of things have changed. Some I am proud of, and several I’m glad my father never knew.

I wish that he could have seen me act on stage and that could have had the chance to read some of my writing. But then again, maybe he has…