Third Time the Hammerfall

August 8, 2012. Hot day, heated heart. Summer should not be the season for grief.

The argentine light of a Kansas City midday pouring down on the giant shuttlecocks on the lawn at the Nelson Atkins Museum, and I immediately think of my Big Bro. I think of the three-year old canyon in my heart, gouged into the terra cotta of my soul. The heat and the light make the sculptures shimmer before my eyes. At least, I tell myself that is the cause as I try not to think too closely about his absence from this earth, on this the eve of the third anniversary of his passing.

I think of giant racquets in the hands of us as young men, ten meters tall and blithely unaware of the power we had as we strode the mountains of our youth. We used to laugh at the words 'badminton' and 'shuttlecock', our teenage brains caught up in a naive naughtiness. Nothing that we could not make a juvenile joke of, that is certain.

I stood still for a few minutes out there on the heat shimmer and dry grass. I was watching my daughter amble slowly down the stone walkway, lost in her own thoughts on a lazy summer afternoon. I felt a tremor of joy seeing my link to the future; I felt a chill breath of wind, shifting my gaze down the lawn where something moved. It was a breeze that rippled the grass, would that make sense? My Occam's Razor solution to the alternative of seeing my brother's ghost out there by there sculptures.

Yeah, that must be it. It was only a breeze. That's the official story.

But me, I know better. My brother and I, we were giants again playing games under the sun, with a mighty backhand swing fading into the light.