Semester of Success

Goals for this semester:

1.) Kick Meteorology's ass, even though, as a science, it has one up on me and I'm probably not going to like it.

2.) Do not miss any classes unless:
a) I have been quarantined due to threat of contagion
b) I am flat on my back in a hospital bed
c) I am dead or actively dying

3.) Remain organized, so there is no frantic hunting down of assignments an hour before they are due.

4.) Get Mrs. Ross moving on my field placement, even if it means I have to camp out on the futon in the Annex.

5.) Enjoy my LAST SEMESTER BEFORE FIELD!!!!!!!!

6.) When I get discouraged, close my eyes and chant: "You graduate in May; you graduate in May ..."

I am determined to stick to these goals. I am doing my best to stay healthy this semester: taking my medicine every day, getting plenty of sleep, eating right. I'm also making an effort in the look-good-feel-good department -- no going to class in my ratty sleep sweats this winter. I'm trying to get up, put on something nice, do my hair, put on some earrings or a necklace or something pretty. I do not want to let this winter best me.

Winter has always been hard -- and autumn, by extension, because it leads directly to winter. I find it hard to enjoy the beautiful leaves and the nice, crisp air when I know that in a few months it's going to get dark at 4:30 and I'm gonna freeze my ass off every day driving a Hoveround to campus. Winter traps me in my apartment, makes my body hurt, and makes it harder to live with clinical depression. But I'm working on that, too: spending every spare hour I have asleep on the couch will be impossible because of Dexadrine, and I'm already feeling better staying awake consistently. I have natural light bulbs in all my lamps, and I'm going to make an effort to at least step out on the balcony every day for fresh air. The only thing I'm really worried about is when they turn the heat to the building on: it gets so hot, I get sick to my stomach. I have 2 working oscillating fans, and I'm going to buy two more. With that and sneaking the windows open, I should be okay.

Fall and winter are hard because of PTSD too, and the strange thing is, I don't really know why. There's just something about the light, the feel of the air, that makes me very nervous and fills my belly with dread. Some mornings I wake up with the urge to scream and hide till it's over. Maybe terrible things happened that I don't remember -- that's very highly likely. I get that feeling in the spring and summer too, but I can usually shake it off because the days are long and warm and it's impossible for me to keep the blues once I get them. This time of year, shaking the nasties off is harder.

I really do think I can do it, though. Somehow I've gained more of myself, more of my own strength, in the past year than I have at any one time before. I just feel stronger somehow. More competent, more capable. And I know that if I need you guys to help me out, all I have to do is holler.

So here goes success!

Rehab Hell

Physical rehab is hard. Really hard. It’s a mess of sweat and pain and exhaustion that has probably worn many a grown person to tears. I was a pretty tough nut to crack, but there were times when rehab bested me. It was slow going, building strength in my wasted and reconfigured legs. The simple act of bending my knees was agony, and for a while, bending my knees was all anybody ever seemed interested in making me do. I got to a point where I dreaded seeing anyone in a white coat come through the door: nurses, doctors, physical therapists. They all put me through the ringer -- and the ones who walked in smiling like they’d had laughing gas for breakfast were the worst.

When it came to rehab, I wanted people to give it to me straight. I was no fool: if I knew something was going to hurt and whoever was going to do the hurting downplayed it, I made it harder for them than it had to be by intentionally refusing to cooperate. (If you’ll pardon my French, I was a pain in the ass. But I’d earned the right to be, so I don’t feel too bad.) Lie to me, and you’d have an awful day at work. I could stonewall with the best of them. I pitched fabulous fits, too. By the rehabilitation part of the whole rigmarole – after being cut open, rearranged, pumped full of drugs, incapacitated with plaster for months and then practically attacked with a terrifying saw, for which I tolerated needles, blood, bruises, I.V. lines and so much damn medical tape I’m surprised I ever re-grew the hair on my arms – I was utterly and completely sick of acting nice when I didn’t feel nice in the least, teensy tiny little bit. So during rehab, when I was frustrated, angry, depressed, taken for an idiot,  I let ‘em have it. When something hurt, I cried about it as loudly as I wanted for as long as I wanted. Screw everyone else: the one being tortured was me. It was the most selfish I have ever been.

It wasn’t all bad. For one, being surrounded by so many people day in and day out meant Mom couldn’t beat the crap out of me for several consecutive weeks. All the hell I went through was almost worth it for that alone. In that sense, rehab was like a perverse kind of vacation. I actually cried the day I was discharged, because I knew that beyond the hospital walls, I wouldn’t be safe anymore.

Believe it or not, some things about that hospital stay were actually really fun. Lying in bed stuffing myself with sherbet – practically the only thing I ate, since the universal truth about hospital food seems to be that it’s disgusting – and watching Heathcliff and Fat Albert and Top Cat was great. Taking a tour of the hospital just to get away from the pediatric unit for a bit could prove very interesting as well: the main lobby had a piano that played by itself, and I was absolutely intrigued by it. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how it worked. For several weeks, I thought there was an invisible person sitting at the bench like some kind of magic trick that I couldn’t quite puzzle out. I’d peer at the air trying to see hands or a head. I was also greatly amused by the automatic revolving doors – I was perfectly content to sit and watch people walk in and out of the building through those things. I’d never seen any. They were a marvel.

Pediatrics had a playroom, of course, and it was truly awe-inspiring. The first time I saw it, I think I just sat there in my wheelchair with my jaw hanging into my lap. One entire wall was taken up by a life-sized dollhouse that kids tumbled in and out of at will. I’m pretty sure I actually groaned in anticipation at the sight of it. Then there were shelves upon shelves upon shelves of glorious toys: a thousand kinds of dolls and dishes and blocks and cars and dress-up clothes and books and crayons and games. I worked myself into a tizzy trying to decide what to do first.

One of the things I grew to love the most was painting. There was a big wooden easel with an expanse of white paper that thrilled me. I didn’t even have to paint anything recognizable to enjoy myself; swishing the brush back and forth and watching the color go where I sent it was more than enough. I tried watercolors, oils, pastels, finger paints. Bright, bold colors made me so happy I used to laugh out loud with delight. Yellow! Green! Red! Orange! I was the mad artiste, gleefully painting to music that only I could hear.

Occasionally, we took a jaunt off the hospital grounds. My mother became friends with the mother of a little boy named Kyle, and we used to have lunch at the Hardee’s down the block. The Hardee’s slogan back then was, Are you ready for some real food?, and after three meals a day of hospital-issue cardboard in various deceptively attractive disguises, “real food” was exactly what my customary order of two roast beef sandwiches and a box of curly fries felt like. I’d wolf it down with gluttonous satisfaction – I was skinny enough to pack some fast food onto my bony little frame back then, and as much as I loved sherbet, it did get a little tiresome trying to subsist on nothing but sherbet after a bit. Having pop was great, too – the hospital operated on a strict, “No soda allowed” policy. The best you could hope for there was a diminutive can of knockoff Sprite.

The hustle and bustle of downtown Indianapolis wowed me every time I encountered it. I was a small-town kid, accustomed to a few stores and houses spread far apart, and not a lot of people. Coming out the doors of Methodist Hospital into the traffic and the noise and the chatter took my breath away. I loved it. I wanted to see everything there was to see: poke my head into every place of business, read every billboard, turn every corner just to see what was on the next corner, and the next corner, and the next corner. We never stayed out long enough to suit me. I could’ve spent an entire day exploring just that one city block. But when you’re in rehab, you’re a slave to the hospital. The hospital becomes your life: you wake there and sleep there and play there; you learn the names of all the nurses and their shifts and who’s nicest and who’s meanest and who’s a pushover and who isn’t. You make friends; you make enemies. You keep going back because, like it or not, the hospital is your second home.

I had an ulterior motive for wanting to delay our return for as long as possible. Physical therapy always came after lunch, and I hated physical therapy. I hated it because it hurt. Boy, did it hurt. I cried every day. I dreaded it so much that I used to plead with my mother not to make me go. After about a week, I started to cry as soon as we’d head in that direction. After two weeks, I was faking illnesses in a desperate attempt to avoid it. By the third week, I had become quite the little fatalist – the torture, I surmised, was simply never going to end. There was nothing I could do. I was at the mercy of my therapist.

In spite of the trauma associated with physical therapy, I actually remember my therapist fondly. She was firm, but sympathetic: she did everything as efficiently as she could, never dared fib about what I should expect, and talked me through the pain in a calm, bright voice that never wavered, even when I was bawling my eyes out and pleading to just be done already. Half the time I never even heard a word she said, but her voice was an anchor in an ocean of hurt. That woman had to have possessed nerves of steel: I can’t imagine spending my every working day around children in dire pain and coming back to it again and again with a voice that unceasingly pleasant. Maybe she practiced in front of the mirror at home. I don’t know. However she did it, it worked: she was a rock, a steady stream of strength.

With excruciating slowness, I regained my legs. Walker, tricycle, parallel bars: I remember it all very well. I remember staring at the mirror at the end of the bars and getting pissed that it persisted in being so far away, getting so incredibly fed up that I lurched to my feet and staggered down the long wooden plane just to prove to that damn mirror that it was not better than me, that I could reach it anytime, any day, and it had better watch out because as soon as I was able, I was going to kick it. I remember the struggle to keep my feet positioned correctly on the pedals of the tricycle, how mad I got that they slipped off again and again and again in spite of all the concentration I could muster. I remember how trial number one with walker number one turned into quite the fiasco: the therapist let go of the gait belt for a split second to readjust her grip, and I picked that exact moment to pass out and give myself a concussion by cracking my head against the floor.

You're a Mean One, Mrs. Grinch

I wanted a tub bath. I wanted a tub bath more than I wanted anything else. I hadn’t had one in ages. I was dying to slide into warm water up to my eyeballs and stay there for eons, until I shriveled up like a Fruit Loop stuck to the bottom of the bowl. Yes, please. And bubbles, thank you very much.

It wasn’t allowed right away. For a few days I had to be content with water from a basin and a warm rag, which felt absolutely splendid on my thirsty legs but which only heightened my desire to immerse myself in a tub. I begged and pleaded for a “real” bath. The first thing I asked every nurse who walked in was, “Can I have a real bath?” After breakfast, after lunch, after dinner: “Can I have a real bath now?” Finally, sick to death of hearing me beg, my mother offered to give me a bath herself. Someone relented.

There were no bubbles, but the water was every bit as glorious as I had imagined it. I was absolutely delighted by the satiny softness of it, by the bottom of the tub against my skin and the soap that smelled so sharp and clean. I just could not hold still: I splashed and squirmed and wriggled like a puppy in a puddle and got everything wet.

My mother did not share my enthusiasm. She did not want to be wet. She did not want to be bathing me; that much showed on her face, pinched and sour. She probably didn’t want to be facing weeks in a hospital sleeping on a cot next to my bed, continuously woken by nurses coming to top up pain meds and unkink intravenous lines. I didn’t either. Less than a week in, and I was already sick of it – I couldn’t sleep on my side the way I liked because the IV was in the wrong hand; I had brought a doll that wasn’t soft enough to snuggle with, and its little plastic fingers jabbed me in the ribs every night; the incessant squeak of the nurses’ shoes made me want to gnash my teeth in frustration. But I was able to forget that for the length of a bath, so why couldn’t my mother? I wanted to have a little fun. I wanted to play. The florescent lights and the smell of antiseptic were making me antsy, restless. Cheeky. Bold.

I splashed her. Just a little, up onto a t-shirt that was already plenty wet. I did it on purpose. I was only trying to draw her into a game, get her to crack a smile. She was putting a damper on my glorious bath, simpering and snapping like she’d never felt a little water before. Didn’t she know that water felt great? I was in high spirits. I wanted someone to share my happiness with! Come on, Mommy! Let’s be silly!

I should’ve known better. My mother’s face darkened like a thundercloud. She started scrubbing me hard with the rough rag, stinging my tender skin. She handled me roughly; my head bumped the corner of the tub and I slid down in the water at an odd angle.

“Ow! Stop! That hurts!”

My good spirits vanished, whooshing out of the room and slamming the door behind them. Anger and spite gathered over my head.

My mother twisted her face, mocked me: “Ow, stop! That hurts!” She made her voice high and nasally. She shoved me into a sitting position again. I glared at her, willing daggers to appear out of thin air and stab her straight in the eyes. She was stupid and mean. I only wanted to play. I told her as much:

“You’re mean. We never have any fun anymore.”

I crossed my arms defiantly. There was an interminable silence in the aftermath of my accusation, during which my mother sneered at me in a way that made my bravado begin to waver: her incredulous expression, her plotting expression, with her lip curled up to show one of her eye teeth and her entire face frozen into a mask of cold, haughty, better-than-you-ness. The first time I saw Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas, (the cartoon, not the movie) it hit me with a bang that my mother’s sneer was just like the Grinch’s. I was impressed. Dr. Seuss had surely met her.

When she spoke, her voice was so low it was almost like she was whispering to herself. She said: “I, for one, have never had fun. Darling.” Then she soaped up the rag and fell to scrubbing hard again, squarely between my legs. It burned and stung. I cried, “No! I can do that myself!” She snarled how I’d never in my life get myself clean enough and kept scrubbing till she was satisfied.

My wonderful bath was thoroughly ruined. I wanted to cry, but I was too angry. I smoldered like banked coals instead. Why did stupid, meanie Mom have to screw up everything nice? It wasn’t fair. I refused to speak to her for hours after that. I did absolutely nothing to help her dress me and put me back in bed. I held still as a stone and kept turning my head so I wouldn’t have to look at her perpetually sour face. For the first time, I felt myself starting to hate her.

Rainbow Sherbet

I remember the day I got my casts off. I was in a room with another little girl who’d had the same surgery. Her name was Amber, and she drove me absolutely frothing mad.

Amber was a few years younger than me, five maybe. Her particular bent of Cerebral Palsy had affected the speech center of her brain, so she couldn’t talk at all – but being mute did not make her one bit less annoying. For some reason, Amber took one look at me and decided I was the greatest person on the planet. But because she couldn’t tell me outright that she thought I was cool, she settled for copying everything I did: when I laid down, Amber laid down. When I sat up, Amber sat up. When I got a drink, Amber wanted one too. I didn’t quite understand that she was trying to be friends. I thought she was doing it just to be a pest, like Matt did when we quarreled – mimicking me to tick me off. It worked. I crossed my eyes, stuck out my tongue, and pulled on my ears – and so did Amber. I gave up. We were assigned separate rooms after a few days, and I was so grateful it wasn’t even funny. I think I said, “Oh, thank God she’s gone.” My mother pretended to scold me, but she was laughing behind her hand.

Getting Spica casts removed is scary business. It involves a plaster saw, and plaster saws are horrifying. They’re huge. They’re loud. They’re sharp. A plaster saw is the last thing on Earth a kid wants anywhere near important body parts like legs. I’d encountered them at least a few times before – the molds for my leg braces, after being allowed to set, were taken off with a plaster saw – but just because I knew what was going on didn’t mean I thought I was going to live through it. No matter how many times in my life someone came at me with a plaster saw, I was always convinced they were going to screw up and amputate my legs.

The saw screamed. Plaster dust flew into the air. I shut my eyes tight – if my legs were getting ready to part from my body, I did not want to watch. When the sawing was over, two nurses grabbed the edges of the plaster and pulled. There was a sound like a loaf of crusty bread being broken in half, only magnified. Then the cool air touched my legs for the first time in ages.

The sensation was exquisite. Every nerve ending had been made new by confinement; the touch of air was like a thousand gentle fingers stroking my skin. I exhaled deeply with the relief of no more itching, no more heat, no more sweat trapped under the plaster. Carefully, slowly, the nurses eased the spent casings off my legs. I had my eyes closed in bliss, but I opened them again before the sheet could be pulled over me. I looked down at my legs, eager to see the back-and-better-than-ever version I had been waiting on for so long. What I saw instead scared the sense right out of me.

My first thought was that someone, somewhere, had seriously messed up. My legs. My legs were wrong. They weren’t legs anymore, just little shriveled white things hanging off my hips like over-watered roots. I didn’t recognize them. They didn’t belong to me. They’d lied to me after all – my mother, all those nurses. They did so take away my legs! They did!

I burst into tears. I was a mutant. An alien. I had been made to suffer, and I’d been robbed for all my trouble. My mother didn’t understand. She was annoyed – after all the whining I’d done about the casts, she expected me to be overjoyed to have them off. But she had neglected to explain to me what I’d find under them when they were gone. I had no idea what atrophy was. I was only a child. I thought the legs that came out of the casts would be the same ones that had disappeared beneath them, and when I didn’t see the tanned, wiry things I had come to identify as mine, I was frightened and repulsed. I wept.

It was the nurse who knew what was up. Thank heavens for pediatric nurses: they’re a special breed. They know children like other children know children, only better. They spend their days soothing sick kids, broken kids, dying kids – terrified kids – and the toll it must take never seems to show on them. They are confidantes and comfort-keepers. A good pediatric nurse always knows what to say, somehow.

“Hey,” said the nurse in charge of my right leg. “Chin up, kiddo. I know it’s scary, but you know what? I think you’re brave. You didn’t cry at all when they turned on the saw, and those things make me want to cry.”

I sniffled. Me, brave? No way.

“Really?”

“Yeah, really. And I hear them every day! Can you imagine that?”

I shook my head. Nope.

“Tell you what. It’s gonna be awhile before your legs are better, but that’s why you’re here with us. We see this all the time. We know how to help. In the meantime, brave girls like you get all the rainbow sherbet they can eat. Would you like some?”

I nodded vigorously. Duh. Of course I wanted sherbet. Was that even allowed to be a question?

The nurse nodded to her colleague and whisked out the door. “Don’t get up and run away, now,” she said over her shoulder. “I won’t know where to find you when I get back, and I’ll have to eat it all myself.” I giggled. We both knew there wasn’t going to be any running, but she made it funny instead of scary. I liked her. She was cool.

True to her word, the nurse returned with sherbet. A gallon bucket of it, to be exact, and a bowl and a spoon. She pulled the table up over the bed and dished out three big scoops of icy cold rainbow deliciousness. Best sherbet I ever tasted. Sherbet made especially for fearless people like me. I ate every bite and licked the spoon with an air of self-importance. It was a great beginning to a long and difficult recovery, a beginning that gave me the ammunition I would need to get through the months of rehab ahead: I could do it, because I could do anything. I was brave.

Just Call Me Acrobat

I spent most of my time in-cast confined to bed. Not because I had to be, but because if she didn’t absolutely have to, my mother considered it too much of a bother to get me up and about. I was heavy, there wasn’t a whole lot I could do to assist in positioning, and the doorways in our house were too narrow for my wheelchair to fit through unfolded, which meant that every time I needed to change rooms, I had to be taken out of the chair so it could be collapsed and relocated and set back up, and then carried to it and settled in again. No doubt it was a pain in the ass.

Not that I’m making excuses for my mother, because I’m not. She took a furlough on the waitressing to stay home and care for me and Matt, but Matt was the only one she ever cared for. Me she left alone as often as she could: she dumped a stack of Little Golden Books on the table next to my bed, threw me a few dolls, and left. I was so bored.

We’ve already covered my reading comprehension. Little Golden Books? Please. The Pokey Little Puppy was so far beneath me, I’d have never deigned to touch it if I hadn’t been about to croak from the monotony of spending every single day in the exact same spot. As it was, I read every one of those incredibly banal books about a thousand times apiece. Then I read them back to front. Then I read them in Pig Latin. I was so bored, I picked the strip of wooden edging off the bedside table just to have something to do. I threw back the edge of the blanket and spent hours making up stories about the characters on my sheets: Strawberry Shortcake, Huckleberry Pie, and the dog called Pupcake had some pretty wild times during those interminable afternoons. Sometimes I got so bored, I’d holler that I had to pee just to have a change of pace. God forbid I actually did have to pee: my mother usually just snapped at me and went back to “Days of Our Lives.” Some days I had to beg for a half hour or more before she’d carry me down the hall to the bathroom, mouthing off the whole time about how impossible I was to deal with. But bedridden me did not care: she thought she was miserable? She could scratch her leg if it itched. She could wipe herself after using the toilet. I’d show her miserable: instead of shutting my mouth when she demanded silence, I got louder and more obnoxious and took the slaps with a defiant glare.

One day, I got so tired of lying still that I started experimenting with using the bar between my casts to pull my legs up over my head. I discovered that if I rolled up off the small of my back, heaved my bottom half into the air and pulled with all my might, I could turn a flip. Hallelujah! I could play Acrobat!

The new game was great. I’d twist and squirm until I was upside-down in the bed with my casted feet touching the headboard. This maximized the amount of mattress I could use, meaning I could flip two, sometimes three times before I ran out of space. Occasionally I overdid it and crashed to the floor, but I figured out how to pull myself back up with a good grip on the footboard and a mighty lunge. I had fantastic upper body strength after a bit.

I could flip for hours before I wore myself out: I accumulated a lot of pent-up energy being in bed all the time. I’d play Acrobat until my face was red and I streamed with sweat and I’d given myself a headache. It was a lot of fun; I’d laugh and laugh every time I teetered off the end of the bed and thumped to the floor. I have no idea what made crashing to the hardwood so incredibly funny, but it was. I think I just needed a reason to laugh, and so I made one. I’ve always been good at that. I still cackle at the slightest provocation. I have a giggle that never quits. Why, I don’t know. It just is. That’s just me.

I wasn’t in bed unceasingly, of course, though it felt like that pretty much all the time. I got up in the evenings when my teacher, Mrs. Quinn, came to the house to give me my homework. She sacrificed a lot of her own time tutoring me so I wouldn’t fall behind and have to repeat the first grade. I don’t know whether the school paid her for it or not, but either way it was an amazing thing for her to do – now that I’m old enough to realize what it would have meant, I’m absolutely certain that I’d have rather peeled all the skin off my body with a paring knife than have stayed under my parents’ roof for an extra year because of missing out on “Frog and Toad lived on an island.” I wish I could find her and thank her for her help.

I also got up when Daddy got home, if I wasn’t up already. Mrs. Quinn didn’t come every single day, so sometimes I was still in bed when the sound of the Jake brake on his semi signaled his presence. Coming into the house and finding me shut off by myself in my room always made him angry. Little girls needed air, he said. Little girls needed sunshine. Little girls needed somebody to play with, somebody to talk to. He’d pop his head into my room and ask had I been out of bed. If I said no, he’d stomp into the living room to find my mother. Their voices would start out low at first, so soft I could barely hear, and then get louder and louder as he got madder and madder at my mother and her response to his question of why I’d not been outside my room for so long, which was always the same: You don’t know what a hassle she is to deal with! You’re never home! Sometimes the fighting would reach way, way back into some realm of truth that my mother kept locked up inside her head and drag up how she really felt about the fact that I existed at all. She’d screech, You want her? You take care of her, then! Absolute silence would fall over the house. My face would burn and burn and burn with hurt and shame.

Then my father would start to splutter. I could picture him standing there, working his mouth like a dying fish, curling and uncurling his fist. He never hit my mother, but there were times in those days when he wanted to – he’d take all his anger and direct it at the wall instead, or at the nearest piece of furniture. A few times he put his fist clean through, and once his flashlight. He’d punch so hard the house shook, then turn on his heel without a word and come to fetch me, scooping me into his arms and carrying me down the hall and out the door into the cool of the evening while I clutched at his shirt and hid my face in his neck to smother my tears.

If there was enough light left in the day, he’d settle me in the grass at the bottom of the hill under the oak tree. Then he’d go back inside and come out with his big hands full of Barbies and little clothes and brushes. Are these okay? he’d ask, and he’d look so wounded standing there, so hopeful that I’d approve of his choices, that I never could bear the thought of sending him for something different. I’d pat my casted legs and he’d hand me all the toys and then disappear around the side of the hill into the basement.

He may have been out of sight awhile, but Daddy was great company even from a distance. I’d hear the crack of a can of beer opening, and then the music would come on.

My Daddy loved Credence Clearwater Revival. He had a tape player and a couple of cassettes, and he’d pop one in and turn it up as loud as it could possibly go. The sound would pour out of the basement and fill the air, and he’d start to sing with it. I never could resist singing along. Proud Mary, Suzy Q, Run Through the Jungle, Cotton Fields, Good Golly Miss Molly. We’d sing. I’d play with my Barbies. He’d drink another beer, and then another beer, and then another beer.

I didn’t begrudge my father his drinking when I was little. I didn’t really understand it. I didn’t see it as a problem. He wasn’t a mean drunk, like some: when Daddy got drunk, he just got evermore fun to be around. He was the kind of drunk who’d go off and dance by himself in a corner somewhere and then sleep it off in the front seat of his pickup with his feet hanging out the door. He didn’t have violence in him then. Anger and frustration yes, but not violence, not yet. He and my mother fought and fought, and the only thing he ever hit was something that wasn’t alive to notice. Pour a few beers in him and he was happy, cheerful. He loved to play with me and Matthew. We spent every night in the basement with him – every single night we possibly could. And they were good nights, wonderful nights, full of play and laughter and music and the adoration of two little kids who thought their Daddy walked on water. I will never forget those nights. The sad part is, my Daddy probably doesn’t remember any of them.