Strange, how long it takes us sometimes to bring compassion into focus. How long it takes to see the giant shadow in the room. I shall tell you a story.

Something happened one day when I was 11 or 12 and living in Bay City, Michigan. It ripped my heart out at the time…and it still does, but for an entirely different reason now. I’ll tell you what it was in a moment, but first I want you to meet George Woolfitt Rogers.

He was my best friend in Bay City. A sterling human being even at age 11, he was the stuff of character and charity from a family that mirrored American exceptionalism. Kentucky born, George lived with a grandmother, an aunt, his schoolteacher mother and an older half-brother in a rambling house that had been built by the lumber barons decades earlier. His father, a chemical engineer for Dow Chemical, had been killed in an explosion when Georgie was an infant. Looking back, I can see how my own father tried to fill that omission in his life. But it was probably the older half-brother who acted as a surrogate father. A valedictorian, Jim was a stalwart role model.

Now the event. We had a swinging door between the kitchen and dining room in the old house whose upper story we rented. One day George was over and he let the door swing shut. As fate would have it, my pet parakeet tried to fly between rooms at exactly that moment. Caught in the pinch of the closing door, his neck was broken. 

I remember every nuance of that feathered death. You can call it anthropomorphism, but when you love a pet, you do read their emotions and his was frozen surprise. Holding back tears, I bore “Peanuts” to my room and cried on the bed until his soft body grew cold in my palm. Somewhere in a drawer in this house I now call home there is still a polished piece of petrified wood upon which I wrote an epitaph in India ink. 

Over half a century has passed since then, but it wasn’t until yesterday when I saw that my son had created a memorial for the ashes of his one-eyed dog Tess that I remembered all this. And it wasn't a memory of lost pets that struck a nerve yesterday. It was remorse over my failure to see how devastated my childhood friend must have been 50 years ago when he so lucklessly contributed to an accident. I never said a word to him that day. Never mentioned the accident thereafter. It must have haunted him, because he never brought it up either. I do not know where he is now, though I’ve heard he was chief medical officer for the state of Georgia at one time, and I see elsewhere that his mother recently died at age 103. Like I said, strange how long it takes us sometimes to bring compassion into focus and to see the giant shadow in the room. 

Well, there is no time machine that can take me back that far, but I can take you back a month through the photos below. Here’s the key: #1 that’s my lad’s new rescue dog Hazel who likes to sit on my lap or stand on my chest looking nonchalant until I stop laughing and hug her; #2-4 kayaking a river with trailmate Mickey Magic; #5 my lad’s birthday at Mall of America; #6 Rice Lake kayaking with Mickey Magic; #7 Peter Norby and friends in a village in the Dominican where I went a few years ago with Bruce Norby to help build a church school; #8-15 Rum River kayaking w/Mickey; #16 at a party with friends.

And a link to my latest StorytellersUnplugged column: http://www.storytellersunplugged.com/2016/08/01/thomas-sullivan-spiders-and-spuds/#respond

20 years ago, before I moved to Mini-snowda, I would’ve said that as I grew older I would become increasingly compatible with some shrink-wrapped, intelligent woman yoked to a mediocre life, someone whose dreams had withered on the vine, an empty-nester not particularly interested in living through her children or grandchildren. Puh. Not gonna happen. I’m still attracted to the passionate, intelligent, courageous, totally honest, objective female with killer looks who doesn’t particularly like the company of other women.

Doesn’t matter that it’s just a fantasy. Dreams have always been preferable to me over compromise. The funny thing is that when you don’t expect a dream to become reality, it may come to you. As it has once or twice to me, unbidden and unexpected, powered by passion so strong that the other attributes – especially courage – fall naturally into place. It is also true that the gods of irony love to test dreams come true.

Hope your dreams are that strong. That’s where energy comes from, you know. Libido by another name. To have energy means to be passionate. Being passionate makes you dream. So it’s a circle – dreams to energy to passion to dreams. It never ages. I like that. I keep faith with it and it keeps faith with me. Because even if the object of such dreams eludes you, that merely frees you up to experience the cycle all over again. If you can’t abide freedom, you can’t abide truth.