15 Years

It's so difficult to realize that Paul would have turned 45 yesterday, if he weren't permanently stuck at 30.  Big difference between 30, when you're old enough to be an adult and making adult decisions and 45, when you are middle aged, maybe starting to get a bit paunchy, stuck in the position you have carved out for yourself, maybe making repairs on the house you bought or going to PTA meetings.

Paul didn't do any of those things.  He hung himself, accidentally or deliberately (there will be a debate on that point within this family forever) on the eve of making an offer on the house he and his wife were going to buy. 

They had been married only 8 months, so there was no baby expected.   (His widow now has 3 children, including a set of twins.  I am jealous of their paternal grandmother.)

They wanted to move to Los Angeles and make it big in the movie business.

I had this vision of his becoming a disgruntled old man (he was already halfway there, a disgrungled young man) and working at some job he hated, never making it big the way he expected to.  I was his mother but one look at the talent he would be competing against told me that no matter how talented he was (and he was talented...but not that talented), it was unlikely that he would take the town by storm.  

But each year at this time I get angry when I see actors getting Golden Globe or Academy awards and thanking their mothers for all their support over the years.  That was what I told Paul I expected him to do.  Instead, when I won an award for being co-author of a musical, just weeks after Paul's death, my acceptance "speech" was to hold the award aloft and say "this is for Paul."   Where was my thanks, Paul?

Ned has turned into a handsome, responsible middle-aged man with more grey hair than I have.  He's starting to get age lines in his face, which look good on him.  Every time I see him, I wonder what Paul would be like if he had lived.

(Tom, somehow, seems perennially young.  Maybe having two kids to chase after keeps him younger looking longer.)

Every year on Paul's birthday we go out for sushi, since he loved sushi and we ate it frequently when we went to dinner together (next week, we will go for more sushi on David's birthday--he wasn't as crazy about sushi as Paul was, but it just seems our "thing" to do on the birthdays of our sons, who no longer celebrate birthdays...and later in April and May when we commemorate their death dates.)

The sushi place we used to frequent when Paul and Dave were alive has closed but there are a butt load of sushi places that have cropped up in the past nearly 20 years.  We went to the one closest to our house, which we had not yet visited, this year.  It turned out be my favorite of the ones we have visited in past years.

Walt had sukyiaki (because he's not a sushi purist on these occasions)...

...while I had something called Bob's Roll, which was delicious.

So.  One down, three to go. 

I went to the cemetery in the afternoon and on the way to the boys' grave, I saw a rabbit hopping across the cemetery--first time I'd seen that.  Off to the side were some of the famous Davis wild turkeys, and on my way back to the car I saw a very large, very red ladybug.  All three encounters made me smile.  As Paul and I always had a "thing" about smiley faces, I took it as a greeting from the grave.