All Saints Day, the day after Halloween, the
day the nuns set us free from Catholic school only to
corral us later in church for mass of the saints
St. Daniel, St. Patrick, the namesakes without the intro
S-T, my brothers with November birthdays.
The days are still theirs, 18 for Pat, 25 for Dan
which sometimes fell on Thanksgiving.
The years pass and still I miss them. No birthday
cards to send, no phone calls to make, talk about
family and football. Pat passed in the spring, pneumonia,
the really bad kind. He got a bad break in his 55th
year.
Dan passed a week before his 61st birthday,
multiple
myeloma, the really bad kind. Both too young. I see them
now even younger, I surf summers with Pat and Dan, backpack
in Colorado with Pat before he went to the Air Force and
Korea.
We're at a school dance, Dan with 30 stitches across his brow
skegged on the morning's big waves, the school now gone,
named for the first priest to celebrate a mass in Florida, Spanish for
flowery. Someday in the future, our photos will be all that’s left,
an ancestor with travel plans for Mars wonders who
are those young guys posing with their surfboards in
front of The House of the One-Eyed Seahorse in Daytona,
sunburned youth wild and free. We forget, that’s the truth
of it,
it’s our lot to forget where we come from. But now, this first
day of November 2023, I remember it all. The images are in
my head; memories, my heart; poem right here, right now,
on
this blog.
2 comments:
Beautiful memories from of my much loved and missed brothers. They are front and center on my Day of the dead alter.
Thanks for sharing your love and feelings for our brothers. Eileen
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