Troy you found your way home. Your own painful short-cut to heaven....and we're all still down here on earth....wandering.

Well today was the day we celebrated my brothers birthday, and more specifically my brothers life. Unfortunately he couldnt celebrate it with us...he died the year i was born. I never got to meet him, but a life apart will be nothing compared to an eternity together. some day i'll meet my older bro...i'm definitly looking forward to it. From what my parents and older siblings say he was quite the amazing guy. He couldnt be here with us now but thats ok, i know he's partying it up with God, Jesus, and all the angels and saints in heaven...besides, we're not quite sure if the cake is going to turn out very well anyways.

I'd like to share a poem Troy wrote a few weeks before he died..at this point he knew it wasnt much longer before all his pain would go away....before his tumor would end his life. Troy was 15 when he wrote this. He was brilliant. Had God not called him home at such a young age, he would be 35 years old today. But i know the excrutiating pain he had to endure was all worth it...he's been in heaven for nearly 20 years.

Troy called this poem "The Wanderer"

The pony sleeps fitfully
watching the night sky for something
not knowing why,
anticipating the unknown event.

Feeling the tension in the air he picks up his head
in time to catch a small glimpse
of a shiny missile of light
that scourched the heaven for but a moment.

A wayward wanderer,
a tramp in the universe,
a free entity,
a powerful creature,
and now a cloud of dust.

These proud remains fall into the sea
confuse an octupus
irratate a shark
and then sink to the bottom

where it joins a myraid other meteors
in the great burial plot of the heavens
at the bottom of the ocean.

and the pony sensing something,
nods his head towards the water.
Last respects paid to the wanderer.

and then gets up and wanders on himself,
in search of food and shelter;
the company of a noisy bullfrog singing in the night
the clicking of crickets
and the first notes of a fresh sparrow
greeting the new day.

He nips off a young shoot of grass
and savouring the fresh green flavour
procedes to investigate the lone tree
he sees in the distance.

It seems to beckon him,
calling him foreward
to cover the unknown ground
and experience that yet unexperienced.

Newly innocent,
there is much in life to see.
Savor time while it lasts;
for it too shall pass the way of the wanderer.

Hope you enjoyed that. Well this will be my last post for a while. Tomorow i go in for surgery....supposedly there is a small chance i may never wake up from my surgery...perhaps i'll get the oppertunity to meet Troy earlier than expected. If it is over a year and this is still the last post on this site...then that is indeed what happened. However, the chance of that happening is very small. So for the next few days i'm planning on being outta commision and just laying in bed feeling terrible. should be good. if all goes well, i plan on writing again in a few days.

Diamonds and Drugs

Ok so heres a rather funny childhood story that i thought i'd share just cuz i didnt know what else to post. It happened in grade 3 or something...maybe grade 4....whichever it was the important part is that i was still a young buck, very young, and easily manipulated by things i had taken in from my surrounding...including, it seems, girls, and jewlery commercials on TV.

So we'll say it was grade 3, you know, that age where you can understand things and think for yourself and make your own decisions, but you still needed guidance...lots of guidance. So, like pretty much every elementary school, we were learning that drugs and alcohol were bad. But in order to keep a grade 3 kid interested you need to do fun things, like posters! oh how i loved to draw posters. i was good...real good....for a young buck that is. What, apparently, i wasnt good at, was listening to instructions. So theres my teacher, Miss. Star Caldwell, giving all of us little tikes instructions on how the theme for our posters is "Dont do drugs", but if we stick to that theme we can draw whatever our little hearts desire. and there i am, off in my own little world, probably daydreaming about Holly Baird or Trina Bradshaw (the two loves of my life back in elementary school...except this was seriouse...i was in love, several times, with each of them, sometimes at the same time)....maybe thats what led to my idea for my poster...but i, and no one else, will ever be sure. So i completely missed the instructions and my teacher started handing out poster paper. This of course got me excited. "oooo golly! we get to draw again today??? YES!"

But by this time in my life i knew that we dont just draw for fun, nope, theres always a reason why the teachers hand out that big poster paper, and theres always certain things you need to draw on it. So i start asking my fellow classmates (probably Holly and Trina first)

"so....babe....those are wonderful wax crayons you have there...what are we supposed to draw?" (oh yes...i was smooth).

Now it seems that everyone in my class didnt know me as well as they should have by now, because they thought i meant "what are we supposed to draw on the topic of Drugs and Alcohol?" so they just replied

"oh anything you want Mark."

Now i was confused! we never got to draw anything we wanted, that was back in the good 'ol days of kindergarten...this is grade 3, this is seriouse business. so i go ask the teacher

"so...ummmm...what do i draw?" who once again underestimated my ignorance and replied
"oh anything you want mark, its up to you."

now i was extatic! anything?!? really anything??? finally this poster had my complete and utter attention. There were 30 kids around me creating works of art but i didnt seem to notice that all of them had the same theme. i was in my own little word. i got to draw whatever i wanted! now before i go on to say what i drew you have to understand that i had just learned to draw diamonds and i was very impressed with my skills in that specific area of art. so this was going to be a grand picture indeed. oh ya, and all our posters were going in for a poster contest and they were going to be hung up on the wall at the high school!!! wow, the high school! this had to be a good poster, old people were going to be walking by it everyday.

i think we got a full hour to do it, maybe more. all i know is that for that hour i didnt look up once from my page - not once to notice that everyone around me, all the other kids in my class, just happened to want to draw about drugs...something we hardly knew about at that age. had i looked up something might of clicked upstairs...but i only noticed my mistake at the very end of class, while we were all handing in our posters...and it was then that i felt a little girly and quite foolish. for after one hour of artwork, i see everybodies posters with ciggarettes, bottles of beer, and drugs, with captions that said:

DONT DO DRUGS
DRUGS ARE BAD
DRUGS ARE WRONG
DRUGS ARNT COOL
DONT DO DRUGS
DONT DO DRUGS

and then....there was mine. having gotten the awesome inspiration from a "Janina's Jewlers" commercial on TV, and being able to draw diamonds like it was my job, i had three beautiful blu diamonds on the centre of the page, surrounded by the breathtaking phrase:

A DIAMOND IS FOREVER!

i dont think i won that poster competition. but in my defence, if my poster had been shipped out to a diamonds poster competition...i woulda won hands down!