Today was a day

Today was a day.

Where do I start?

It was a luxurious day…although I had a regular day at work, Spring Break has afforded me a break from much of he usual routine. I have set aside the extra time this week to catch up on

things that have been waiting for too long to get done. So, by the end of the day, I have a new battery in my watch, and purchased some basic supplies, took in some pants to get hemmed (one of the costs of being vertically challenged) and took the luxury of munching on a caramel apple while I was being productive in the mall! I’ve got the satisfaction of several things “crossed off” the list.

Partway through the day I caught the headline in the paper of a man who died in a fight at a party…it’s never good to read of the needless death of someone. Violence is ugly. What was hard about this one for me personally, was that the man died at a house party on the same street that I grew up on as child. The street that held hours of playing with the neighborhood kids…street hockey, dodge ball, playing hide and go seek, skipping and the like. Where we would play until it got dark and we would gripe about having to go in when our moms called us. The place where the innocence of childhood held laughter and playfulness—on the weekend, it was the place of violence and death.

When I got home today, it was still light out, and the beautiful spring day was still in all its glory. I had a chance to take advantage of this rare luxury of time and went for a long walk. It was beautiful. Saw runners in shorts and T-shirts and walked by bushes that, on close inspection, showed the earliest signs of budding. I think budding branches have become one of my favorite sights in life. Saw a dad teaching his little girl how to throw and catch a Frisbee. Her delight was clear—his was also very apparent as he enjoyed each time she managed to catch the swirling disc. I watched the patterns of ice on the river, felt the way the ground shakes when a train goes by, and had the chance to take my time enjoying the fresh air. Wow, it was incredible.

Throughout the day though, there was an awareness that years ago, this day was a day that was the beginning of a series of events that changed my and my family’s life forever. It was one of those days that seems so significant when I look back on it, but there was no way of predicting what the end result would be all those years ago. It’s a day I mark internally in my head as one which was the catalyst of much pain, tragedy, growth, forgiveness, and eventually, joy and triumph. A day that had many more frozen puddles than there are today. You know those events in life when you look back and time is marked as “before” and “after”? Today I mark this day as one of those “before and after” days, where time stands still, and I can still lose myself in the silly game of “what if’s”.

Today was a day. It was a sort of day that was intense in its wonderful satisfaction and in its stark memory. The sort of day where wonderfulness and melancholy collide in a kaleidoscope of memory-making and memory-remembering, of delight and destruction, of happiness and horribleness. Today was a day when all that makes us human came together in a day.

Today was a day.