My pal CeeElCee brings up a good point about all the flood of e-mail marketing preceding Father’s Day (and for that matter, Mother’s Day, for the same reasons) that I’ve been thinking about myself in recent weeks, and have in the past.

We are all mostly taking it in stride and being tongue in cheek about it over there in comments, but obviously all of us whose fathers are deceased have had pretty much the same thoughts about it all, as I’m sure folks who have lost their mothers thought the same in the flood of e-mail marketing preceding Mother’s Day.

My mother’s alive and well, thanks (and a frequent reader & commenter here, and regular Internet user).

But what if she weren’t? Not to mention the fact that HER parents have been gone for ages; one for nearly as long as I’ve been alive.

I had a long conversation for the first time in several months with my former longtime co-worker, who lost her very elderly and extremely ill dad last summer. One of the things she and I have always had in common is that our fathers’ birthdays and Father’s Day always fell on the same week (as does her birthday). So this year, she is experiencing the June double whammy I have been for the last four years.

I get that it’s all about marketing, I understand it. And I know you can’t please everyone. I mostly - like I said - take it in stride and just overlook it. Normally it doesn’t bother me THAT much.

But it ALWAYS gets my attention, because of the circumstances - and it’s NOT the kind of attention marketers are striving for with those Mother’s Day and Father’s Day suggestion e-mails.

And I guess what kind of bugs me is that it seems like those holiday marketing e-mails are greater in number at Mother’s Day and Father’s Day than most other holidays, even Christmas. And while I do realize it’s all about the marketing, and I understand why it’s a necessary evil - it just seems like it might be a little better if many of these e-mail marketers scaled back their holiday marketing pummeling for those two holidays for the very reasons I bring up.

You hit someone like me on a bad day in a bad year - last year, not so much; this year, every day is a bad day - and tick them off, the results are never going to be good.

Again, I don’t have that big a chip on my shoulder about it, really. Generally, I’m pretty laid back and easygoing and not all that touchy about most things, I just have to work a little harder at it when it comes to this. And for the most part, the ones that come from Amazon and places like that, I mostly just overlook and hit the delete-delete-delete without much more of a thought.

Though the point is, there IS a thought… and it’s not the one they want me to have, that they’re intending with their marketing campaign of those holidays.

I have many, many e-mail boxes so I get TONS of these mails, and even more tons that aren’t coming from more traditional Internet marketers and are coming from the mega-spammers.

So it’s there that I take out my frustrations when I feel like it - which, this year, has been rather often. So depending on what kind of mood I’m in at the moment - well, let’s just say there’s several e-mail spammers that have been getting “My father’s been dead for almost four years, go away” e-mails back.

Not that they care, the mega-spammers. I can’t really say I haven’t thought about doing the same with some of those Amazon and other e-mails though.

Marketing’s marketing, and there’s no simple answer, I know.

But fair warning, marketing e-mail spammers and marketers of the non-spammish kind: Today would have been my father’s 66th birthday, so I might be a little less nice than “go away” today. Apologies in advance.

I never knew how old Lulu was. She was already middle aged or more when I found her seven or eight years ago, or however long ago it was. So she was probably at least 14 or 15 now, maybe more.

She had been resting and calm again when I went to sleep. When I woke back up, I thought she was gone, but she turned her head to me when I called her name. I went over and moved her out of the puddle of drool she was laying in - she probably thought I was mad, I hope not.

The young ones hadn’t been out since early this morning and were going berserk to go out, so I let them out and tried to hurry them up. Daisy and Bruiser got too involved in some greenery at the back of the yard and were taking their time and driving me crazy over it, and FINALLY I herded the four young ones back inside.

But she was already gone.

I’m going to go clean her up now.

So did Super Tuesday actually happen yesterday? Because there was no talk of anything on the news here yesterday except this tornado, that tornado, the next tornado, and the one after that, and etc., etc., etc. Starting about 4:30 pm and well after midnight, on at least one local station that was virtually it.

Living in the center of the city, I’m usually protected ‘cos the main danger zones in the Metro Memphis area tend to be out in the ‘burbs. Still, I didn’t sleep last night because nowadays, when the sirens start going off, my adrenalin rush just gets out of this world (and if you’ve never been here before or have forgotten, this is why).

There was some damage not too far away though, out in the airport area; lots of damage out in the eastern suburbs and across the state line in DeSoto County, Mississippi; and probably the most stunning, for here, was the 50-foot chunk of wall taken out of Hickory Ridge Mall down in Southeast Memphis. Kid sister and her hubby lived not too far from there, just south of Germantown, until they moved a couple of years ago, so for once, I was actually happy they are now living in Nebraska. Otherwise last night would have been even more horrifying and frightening.

Though there was plenty going on here last night to freak out about, I found myself much more affected by the news of the tornado that blitzed the north part of Jackson, Tennessee, about an hour northeast. The damage was huge in many spots up there, most notably the demolition of a/some dormitory building(s) at Union University.

Why would that affect me so much more than what was happening right here in my own back yard? Because when I got caught on the road in my car during the 2003 tornado that hit Jackson, I was pretty much right there by Union University. No matter that I was basically safe at home an hour away, last night in my little house in front of the computer, listening to and watching the live stream of the continuing weather update on one of the local stations. When they said a tornado had touched down in Jackson and said where, I knew exactly what it looked like up there at that moment, ‘cos I’d been there, right there in it.

I guess I’m always gonna be a little more freaked out by bad storms and the sirens, but for a moment or two, that really, really bothered me last night. Glad I wasn’t out in it all, here nor there, but just hearing about them now in places I know - and especially that one twister in particular, striking right there where I was that night in 2003 - it’s just kinda bone-chilling.

On another note, thanks to everyone who stopped by and left such kind words about Rocky yesterday, including some I haven’t heard from in years and years. Very much appreciated, all of you. I left out one little part yesterday I meant to throw in there, so bear with me a sec and I’ll stop talking about it soon enough.

Like most of my zoo, Rocky was a foundling. My neighbor who lived here for years came home from work one day a little over ten years ago, and when he got out of the car, there was this little tiny orange kitten in the small tree right above the driveway mewing at him. So of course he immediately knocked on my door, orange ball of fur in hand.

And because there is an invisible sign on my forehead that only cats and dogs can see that says “SUCKER”, the little orange furball never left. Seems like only yesterday, and when he was so sick and old and leaving us, that’s really all I kept thinking about, that day years ago.

Well, that’s it for the moment, I’m so tired I’m about to drop dead, so I’m off for now. Tomorrow maybe I’ll write about my Christmas adventures. It’s not a pretty tale.

P.S. Again on tornadoes - does Knuck have the right idea? ‘Cos what if the tornado hits your house, but doesn’t really blow it up and just does some damage but nothing fatal to you or the house, and then you ARE wandering like that, and then you’re, like, this naked guy wandering around Nashville post-tornado, and…

It’s really still too early in the morning for me to ponder this. Smiley will have the punchline I’m too exhausted to come up with right now, I just know it.

Dobie & His Cat, Rocky… or Vice Versa

Originally uploaded by LynnsterZone.

Well, time for my once a month post again, I guess. Except I have kinda sorta made up my mind I’m going to start blogging daily or almost again, even if it’s not much of nothing but a couple of sentences or even if it’s just - whatever.

As for me & what all’s going on with me, things could not possibly be much worse than they are right now and have been for a few months now. I guess there’s a few things that could be worse but really, comparatively, at this point most of those wouldn’t make much of a difference. I’ll spare you and me both the gory details for now because it’s just too icky to all get into, and since I live with it day after crummy day after crummy day, I’d just as soon not infect my blog with it the way it has everything else in my life. So for now, let’s just say it’s pretty bad and just move on from there.

In other news, Rocky left our happy little zoo a few weeks ago. He was ten years old and this more often affects older cats, but he had been in old-age kidney failure for some time and when a respiratory bug hit most of the felines in the house in January, he was unable to withstand it. I have another older one also in declining health who is still struggling a bit with the bug (she’s 16), but she’s improved and back to her usual grumpy and neurotic self now.

Anyway, here is one my favorite pictures of Rocky with his dog, Dobie. I never really knew whether Dobie was Rocky’s cat or Rocky was Dobie’s dog. The night Rocky passed, two of the other cats (”little sister” Missy, and Schuyler) and Dobie stayed right by his side until he was gone.

I have another - and the hardest - one coming up in about a month, but today is the birthday of one of my most special and favorite and closest friends ever.

Once, we were the same age… well, except for me being three months older.  Now I’m 41, but he’ll never be anything but 17.  Permanently.  Forever.

How almost a quarter of a century can pass pretty much in a blink of an eye, I’ll never really understand.

One thing I usually do every morning, since I have extended family all over Northwest Tennessee - not to mention all the friends and their families back in my two hometowns up yonder - is check The Jackson Sun’s obituaries, because you never know when something might have happened like that that you really probably do need to know about. Now that I’ve gotten to “that age” where things like that seem to happen more and more - no longer just people’s grandparents passing away like it once often was, but their parents, siblings, sometimes themselves - I try to stay on top of it all, and have ties to several counties up there to check up on. A couple of my friends are good about calling when it’s somebody or their parent or whatever that we know really well, but a lot of times someone’s mom or dad will have passed away or something that they won’t think to let me know about, and I’d like to send a card or whatever - that kind of thing - so I just try to make sure to check the Sun as well as my hometown paper’s websites daily (or weekly in the one case).

This might just be a Northwest Tennessee thing (or a rural group of towns kinda thing), but I find that since I’m scanning the obits real quick at a glance every day, it’s quicker for me to scan down the column list of funeral homes rather than the towns themselves. I guess it’s odd that I know the names of all those small town funeral homes so well that it’s quicker for me to look through the page that way, rather than reviewing the towns themselves - but again, I think that may just be a Northwest Tennessee, or at least rural-ish, thing. I know Karnes is in Dyer, and Shelton’s in Trenton, Stockdale-Malin in Camden, and so on and so forth all over the northwest part of the state. Sometimes I have wondered if Newscoma and Squirrelly do somewhat the same thing, or if it’s just some weird quirk with me, but it seems I just process the information much more quickly looking down the column of listed funeral homes than the list of towns on the page. I dunno why.

OK, so yep, that’s kinda weird. I’m well aware of that.

I also get e-mail obituary notifications from one of the funeral homes back home. Which is really convenient, but it’s also kind of a source of amusement for me because, well, if you’re from that particular town of my two hometowns, who’d have ever thought something like that via the information superhighway would EVER be available, you know. Until a few years ago, that town had all of one - ONE - traffic light. Things seemed to be getting really progressive when the OTHER, and first, funeral home in town put in a recorded obituary line you could call to see who’d passed on and was laid up there at the moment. Which that in itself is another source of amusement to me, because the fact that my little hometown is even able to support TWO funeral homes is just crazy to me. But apparently they’re both doing well, both the original and long-standing one as well as the newer kid on the block (which, admittedly, is really not so new anymore, I guess it’s been there about ten years now, but it’ll always be “the new one” to me and half of everybody else back home).

Now, in my other hometown, there have been two funeral homes for as long as I’ve been around and way before me; in fact, technically, there’s three, maybe even four (not sure about that). But the two main, large ones - they’ve always been there pretty much. And every family in town, no doubt, has their preference of where their people will go when the time comes.

Or you have families like mine where one side of the family (my grandmother’s) were all laid to rest by one funeral home, and my grandfather’s side of the family all had their preparations and funerals at the other. Nowadays that the older folks are all gone and it’s just the children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, I think we’re all pretty much sticking with just the one for those needs (the one my grandfather’s side always went to). The family that runs that particular funeral home includes folks that grew up with, went to church with, and/or went to school with both my parents, my uncle, cousins, etc., so it’s just kind of natural that in the end, all the “younger” generation has gravitated towards that one for all burial and funeral needs. I don’t know, nor do I know that I ever have known, the people that run the other one, and it’s been going on 30 years since we’ve had a family funeral there, my great-grandfather being the last one. So when the time comes for my Mom hopefully way far off in the future - assuming I outlive my mother, that is - I’ll be calling Leon (or his son), and they’ll do what they do, and there ya go.

The fact that everything I just wrote is so convoluted and complicated is actually one of the things I love about being from the South, or at least the more rural parts and small towns of the South. There are probably very few small town anecdotes you can tell or subjects you can try to explain that are specific to Southern small towns without it getting all complicated and convoluted like that, all those little details and stories and tangents.

Oh, there’s much, much more besides the funeral home deal, and I’m sure I’ll write about a lot more of it in the future, not enough time for that right now. But that stuff just cracks me up, plus I’m glad of it, I really wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s just the kind of stuff you just don’t find everywhere, just in Small Town USA, and some of it’s so very specific to small towns in the South.

Anyway, guess what, none of that’s really what this post is about. Not exactly, anyway.

As I mentioned above, I get the e-mail notifications from the one funeral home back home. So yesterday afternoon during my lunch break, as I’m trying to catch up all the conversation and lots and lots of clamor that was the local-ish blog world yesterday, my e-mail beeps and I go see what I got.

And it’s from that funeral home, and I look at the name. Which is not exactly a terribly uncommon name, even though this is a small town we’re talking about. There’s actually several people in town that share both the same first and last names in this case; in fact, two of them with the exact same name graduated with me, even though I graduated in a class of only 160-odd folks. They had different middle names though, so one was “Firstname D.” and the other “Firstname K.” - or “Big Firstname” - when you spoke of them.

Anyway, I saw it, and immediately said, “No…” And clicked on the link to go to the website and looked, where the birthdate confirmed yes, not no.

Look, this wasn’t someone I was particularly close to or knew that well at all. Just a few days ago I wrote about being a little shell-shocked recently over friends’ brothers and sisters, both older and younger than me, having recently passed away and how weird that was to deal with. Well, this is the older sibling of another one of my friends, one of my gang from school days. Again, not someone I knew well, even though his brother was one of my crew - but kind of ironically, someone else I was in school with myself, and someone else I shared a lunch table with for an entire year. And someone else who, though I didn’t know so well, was always pleasant and super nice.

It’s really kind of unnerving and is definitely sad and depressing in any case, but especially since this is the third time since the first of the year that siblings of friends have died, they’re all around my age, two I was in school with myself. It’s not the big city; it’s a really small town. And people that are 44 and 42 and 39 years old within less than two months in this really small town - it’s flabbergasting as well as depressing.

And I’m further bothered because in small towns like where I come from, when someone dies or someone’s people pass away, what do you do? You go to the funeral home for visitation, or the funeral, or both. But you don’t NOT go. You ALWAYS go. I am just not close enough to go every time something happens, which I know people understand. But even though I’ve been a city girl for many decades now, the small town girl in me wants to be able to go every time something like this happens, and pay my respects. And this is about the forty millionth time something’s happened and I can’t go. Yes, that’s an exaggerated number, but it’s certainly no exaggeration as pertains to what it feels like.

So in the course of all that yesterday, I just kind of took the night off last night from anything involving the online world, save for a big project I’m working on right now, and you can probably see why stunt legislators and their circuses and any other big major things that I was acutely aware of yesterday suddenly seemed very insignificant and small in the great big grand scheme of things. The fact that someone I know and think very highly of and like a great deal, and literally grew up with, lost his older - and only - brother, who was only two years older than the friend and I… that was much more important, as well as dealing with the disturbing fact of these other recent losses. It all bothers me a great deal as well as being, naturally, sad, so I “took the night off” to reflect and ponder. And talk to my mom since I hadn’t in a few weeks.

So basically what I’m saying, in a very roundabout way, is I am still in the middle of working on this huge project in my off time and suddenly yesterday the e-mail and everything else got really backed up, and all of that was even before this bit of bad news that kind of knocked me out of commission for the rest of the day. Then my big project kind of took an unexpected (read: taking more extra time to correct) turn last night, and the rest of this week is looking pretty busy for freelance work so there goes a lot of my catch-up time. So bear with me a day or two or three while I get caught back up, if you were waiting on something or if I’m slow to respond, that’s why… thanks mucho grande bunches.

I didn’t write about this at the time because there was a lot of other stuff going on, but the older sister of one of my best girlfriends from high school died several weeks ago. When I say “older”, I mean 44 years old; would have been 45 this year. I actually thought she was a little bit older than me than just four years, but no, she was 44, and died after a long battle with cancer that I wasn’t even aware was going on, since I don’t live locally and I guess nobody thought to tell me until it was too late.

Our overall gang of gals was pretty large and we all hung out together and with various ones of the other separately, and granted, I went to high school in a small town that was oddly not very cliqueish, so everybody just kinda hung out with everybody. But there were 15 or so of us that were really tight, and then that was further kinda divided into smaller core groups of two to five people.

My little branch was the group of five, you rarely saw one of us without at least one, or more, of the others. And it just so happened that all the other girls in my little core group had one older sister apiece, so I sort of inherited four big sisters by default. Only one of them was I particularly close to, and she is still alive and well and we still see each other once in a while today; but I certainly was fond of all the rest, and all of the older girls not only tolerated all five of us teenagers, but were actually really cool with us and hung out with us quite a bit. We got to go to lots of bachelorette parties, quarters sessions and parties at a lot of the older college crowd’s apartments in Jackson and Martin, “adult”-ish functions like barbecues, and all kinds of other stuff (usually involving a fair amount of underage drinking) thanks to the big sisters.

This one that recently passed away, however, I was always especially fond of because she was just so sweet. Everyone adored her, and you never heard her say a bad word about anyone. Her best friend and former neighbor also worked with my dad for many years, so he knew her pretty well and was fond of her, too. It also just so happened that my high school sweetheart, at the time we started dating, was her brother-in-law, though she had just begun the process of divorcing his older brother then. Still, she and my boyfriend were buddies and remained friendly, so there was that tie to her, too.

A few years ago, the phenomena that has now become an ongoing and continual thing of many of my friends’ parents passing away began. As another friend and I discussed shortly after there had been a one-two-three hit of three parents in a row dying one right after another, we said we guessed we were just getting to that age, and it was likely going to happen more and more.

And so it has, though it really took some getting used to in the beginning, and since has included my own father. With me living far from home and not seeing or being in regular contact with a lot of my friends from home these days, it seems like the only time I talk to or e-mail with some of them is when someone else’s mother or father has died, whether I’ve called or e-mailed to tell them, or vice-versa.

I wasn’t really prepared for a rush of people’s siblings to start passing away, though. I know 40 years old sounds old to some people and, granted, technically it is indeed middle-aged (ugh). And granted, too, I am certainly no stranger to loss, which Kathy T. recently managed to chronicle so well in the latest installment of her Wrinkles series. How she did it, I don’t know, because I am a terrible interview - it’s got to be like listening to a person with the worst case of ADD in the world - but Kathy is an excellent writer/reporter and somehow managed to make sense of all my babbling. There is a REASON why The Lynnster Zone has been “babbling since 1997″, and not “intelligently blogging in clear and concise thought since 1997″, yep.

But I can handle, and have come to expect, news of friends’ parents’ deaths. It’s always sad, but never such an unexpected shock and surprise anymore like it was at first.

People’s brothers and sisters passing away, however, is starting to freak me out a little bit. And much, much worse - someone’s younger sibling passing away - that is freaking me out even more.

Almost all my friends had kid brothers or sisters, many of whom often came over to my house to swim in the pool, or that we took to Opryland with us when we went, or Lisa and I (who saw at least two if not more movies a week) would take along with us to the movies, or my high school sweetheart and I would load up in the back seat and take along to the movies with us.

It was just that way, small-town way I guess. Our friend Angie’s house was on the way to Waverly and the walk-in theater, so we’d drop by on the way out of town (we all practically lived out there anyway), as we did when we were headed over to Waverly to see Sixteen Candles. Ang’s kid sister was having a slumber party that night, they begged to go, so we squeezed a half dozen seventh grade girls into my boyfriend’s car and toted them along.

So the thought of any of my friends’ younger brothers and sisters, all of whom are younger than 40 - these are kids I babysat, took to the movies, fed them peanut butter and jelly and tuna fish sandwiches in the summers when they came over swimming, played countless board and card games with, all kinds of stuff - the thought of something happening to any of them is just terrible and not something I want to see happening. Sure, they’re grownups now. But anything happening to any of them, it just horrifies me and takes my breath away, really.

And so it does.

The other day I flipped thru the Jackson paper’s website, as I usually do most days, and spotted a familiar name in the obituaries. For a second I really didn’t think about it, because the name is kind of a common one, and I thought, “No, can’t be.” But then I glanced at the age, and clicked on the link to the actual obituary that listed family member names and such, and my heart fell.

Honestly, I didn’t know this boy as well as I did many of the others, and while I knew his older brother fairly well - he had dated a girlfriend of mine for some time when she was in high school and he in college - I was not as good friends with him as I was many others in the same general crowd and age group. But yeah, I knew both of the brothers. They were both very nice, and very quiet, guys.

This one particularly bothers me, though, even though I didn’t know him as well as many other friends’ siblings. I spent an entire school year having lunch with this guy, and the memories are not only very clear, but very specific.

My junior year in high school, all five of us girls in my little core group had lunch at the same time that year, so we sat together every day, and early on commandeered on one of the two tables that were in adjoining room to the main room of the school’s cafeteria, a little side room where all the vending machines were. Convenient for me, since I spent most of that year either not eating and having a Coke for lunch, or maybe I’d have a Coke and a Twix bar, or a Whatchamacallit. Or I’d be filling up a cup of water and mixing in Cambridge Diet powder - this was before Slim-Fast - which I didn’t need at the time but thought I did.

I was never a good eater - still not - and the only days I ever ate cafeteria food, usually, was when they were having pizza. I LOVED school pizza. My friend Chris’ mom was a teacher at the elementary school, and she used to buy big boxes of school pizza to keep at home, which I would raid any chance I got an opportunity. That year, he and I were arguing and not on speaking terms more often than not, especially after I threw my drink in his face when he tried to make nice and kiss me on the cheek at midnight on New Year’s, which resulted to full-out war for a few months afterwards. In any case, my access to school pizza outside of school and school hours became severely limited that year, so that’s probably why my hitting people up for their pizza on pizza day in school became so exacerbated. Like a crack addict begging for drugs or money, I was hitting people up for their school pizza.

Then for a while, one of the two arcades in town started buying it from the same place and selling it at the arcade, which was wonderful. If not for school pizza, I’d have starved to death that year, or at least been down to probably 70 lbs. from the 95 lbs. I already was and thought was too fat. Sixteen and seventeen-year-old girl’s brains operate in an entirely alternate reality from the logical and reasonable world most of the time, in case you didn’t know.

Anyway, back to my junior year and lunchtime. We girls shared the table that year with a group of mostly freshman and some sophomore boys, most of whom were football players. We sort of big-sistered them all year long and there wound up being some kinda good fringe benefits for them, because (A) we all had driver’s licenses, and (B) seeing as how my girlfriends and I threw a large number of the outdoor parties every year, they had an in for not only those but other parties around town by virtue of hanging out with us.

Lucky for them it was our junior year, when we had something going on somewhere nearly every night of the week, rather than our senior year, when we all had boyfriends and didn’t have near as much fun as the year before. Anyway, I spent quite a bit of time that year being taxi service for not only my girlfriends who didn’t have cars yet, but a large number of younger guys that hadn’t turned 16 yet, including our lunchtime crew.

Three of those boys were really, really funny and had us cracking up the entire lunch period. A couple of the others were just really good guys.

And then another one who was generally pretty quiet and just listened to all the jokes and babbling and cackling and such at the table and laughed along with us all. But when he did have something to say, it was always really hilarious. He was the one whose older brother moved in my crowd of friends and dated one of my girlfriends.

My near-anorexic habits were always a big joke around the table, but then would come pizza day. I’m pretty sure (because I can think of no other reason why I would have been hounding people every pizza day for their pizza, so it must be true) that they limited everyone to one slice of pizza, probably for fear of running out; otherwise I would have just bought a second slice. Plus we were the first lunch period that year, so they were probably even more strict about it; third period lunch, if there was still plenty left, you probably could have begged and paid for another slice.

In any case, come every pizza day, I was always scoping out who I could maybe talk into giving up their pizza, because even though I ate next to nothing most days, on school pizza day I had to have two slices whether I was really hungry or not, I just loved it so much. I remember always paying special attention those mornings, looking around the halls and in class to see who all had lunch at the same time as me that was sick and not feeling well - because more often than not, somebody who wasn’t feeling well (or hungover, whatever the case might have been) could be easily talked out of their pizza.

The guys I was friends with in my own class that had lunch at the same time sat at another table in the main room of the cafeteria, and they were always greedy with their pizza; unless I got lucky and one of them was sick, they’d see me coming and shoo me away on pizza day before I could even ask. Same with the senior boys, except they’d at least be polite and friendly about it; still, no amount of flirtation or bribes ever got me a single slice of pizza out of that table.

Most of the time I wouldn’t even bother with any of the girls, because too many of them either brought their own lunch or, like me, were on a Coke or Diet Coke diet and weren’t having pizza anyway. Sometimes I could get someone to go through the line for me and get an extra tray, and I’d take the pizza and distribute the rest among the guys at our table. A lot of times I wouldn’t even have to go beg and be a pizza pest; someone would just walk over and voluntarily give theirs up. Yep, that’s how much I loved school pizza.

It was always a fair trade, I’d make it worth their while. You want four bags of potato chips out of the machine for that pizza? Okay, here you go. Two Twix bars and a Dr. Pepper? Right here. Since I worked at the hospital, I always had money and change, which many kids didn’t generally have because they didn’t work, so vending machine bribery was always an option for me. And, I can still tell you today, could make a list of names, of who would never give theirs up without a trade and who would toss me their pizza out of the generosity of their hearts.

I rarely hassled the boys we sat with, because they were mostly pretty big guys, football players, and would often be eating their whole school lunch tray AND a brown bag lunch from home. If one of them was sick (or hungover), sometimes they’d offer on the front end, but I just didn’t bother them otherwise usually. I had my three or four tables in the main cafeteria I’d go hound, and rarely came away emptyhanded.

The one quiet guy at our table was probably the one that most often volunteered his slice, though, and would never accept anything in return, even though he was the biggest guy at the table - not fat, just big, football-player big. He’d push his pizza over to me, then say something hilarious - because like I said, what little he did talk when he managed to get anything in edgewise in the rest of the noise at the table - when he did say something, it was always very, very funny.

Maybe he just wanted to see me eat, as most of those folks at our table were always trying to get me to. Laughing and cracking jokes about it, but there was always kind of acknowledgement of my all-too-apparent budding eating disorder under the surface.

And he was just a nice guy anyway, a really good kid. Not unlike his older brother, who also a very quiet and nice guy, and whom I knew.

So it kind of bothered me the other day to see that this guy, someone else’s kid brother, had passed away. I don’t know what happened - from the way the obituary read, I assume illness of some sort. He was 39, had a wife, some kids, and now he’s gone. Someone else reads the paper and thinks, maybe, it’s sad t