The first death I knew was Bampa's...my mother's father, who died shoveling snow in Detroit musta been around 1966...and we were 500 miles away....from home, as the song has it. Couldn't understand why I couldn't go see him. He's in heaven now, Mom said. Well can I go see him in heaven? I figured why not, it's a place, right, get in the car and go visiting. He found things in the dump and fixed them. This once, he tried to give me a three-wheeled car but I wanted it to have four wheels. So...he found a 4th wheel. He was a miner. I had to be quiet, visiting, when they lived in Calumet on Pine Street...sat quietly in the living room with a tv-tray, paper, pencils, and drew pictures of battleships dropping turd bombs and airplanes, I can see them still, dropping turd bombs. I was a paha boyga...bad boy in Finn.
Next one to matter is a younger brother, April of '68 may it do ya fine...though there was not much snow on the ground.
Bunch of others in between David...aunts, uncles, never knew paternal grandparents although dad's step-mother passed as did her youngest child, Leona, a Down's baby who attained the age of 65. Then were was Mom, 14 OCT 87...she was fifty, melanoma cancer. Dad on 3 NOV 00, the day before George Bush was elected...another brother on 30 JUN 02...he was 35, taught high school math and science. He won the admiration of his students when he blew up the science lab. Not really...or, close...he sent a test-tube through the ceiling tile and panicked...to put it lightly...fearful he had damaged someone's children. He was a real wizard, too, salutatorian of his high school class...I went to him with my math problems...like how to do this gazebo thingy I built in Mt Vernon Iowa you're ever there check it out on 3rd Avenue.
A pile of others...a cousin 16 to cancer...several other female cousins to breast cancer...one never missed a day of school, Marty, and she was a kindergarten teacher, high school classmates, Muttu, who was knocked down by a vehicle and dragged for a quarter mile in winter before the driver thought to stop, Jack, who went through the ice on the Cuts and was found frozen sitting up against a tree in the spring, Dave and Steve who hit a tree on airport hill coming back from Pete's wedding reception, Bernie, whose heart gave out on him, same as two Brians.
