Hold on tight

It's never good news when my mom calls after 9 p.m.

She told me - voice breaking, tears flowing - and there was that moment of no, it can't be, this is a mistake, somehow someone somewhere got this thing wrong.

He and his wife and baby son moved to our small town when I was about 13 or 14, and since then they were a permanent and welcome fixture in the community. Jim had this aura of charisma, school-boy humor and precociousness that drew people to him like a magnet. He made you feel that you were the only person in the room, and that you were the most interesting of them all. His smile was an instant icebreaker, and I can imagine it served him well during his prolific business career. I babysat for their sons until I left for undergrad, and they always made me feel like I was part of their family. I can still smell that dustiness of the old buildings behind their Victorian home, and recall with vividness the colors of the playground equipment and their sons' blond hair against the fall skyline. I recall countless games of tag and countless stories and lots and lots of jumping and throwing and running and band-aid-ing. They often invited me to their cabin as an extra set of hands for three very wily boys during summer vacations on the lake, and I now find myself saying things to my kids that Lynne or Jim would say to their kids. They were mentors, friends, and people who inspired me to dream big. When they got home after a night out and the kids were asleep, Jim would tell me stories of their college days, about balancing the tough math classes with ones like film appreciation (I can still see his face extolling the hidden meanings of Alfred Hitchcock's movies), and sometimes Lynne would make us chocolate shakes and we'd sit up and talk some more while Saturday Night Live played in the background. I know they believed in me as much as my parents did, and I would often see them during visits home long after I moved away. I last saw Jim at a dinner at their home this past June, and he was absolutely giddy with the kind of joy you only see on a Grandpa's face when he interacted with my kids. It is an absolute tragedy that he never lived to see his own grandchildren.

For some reason I keep thinking about the time that I'd been asked to write up a small blurb about my study abroad experience in Costa Rica for the church newsletter. Jim had told my mom that he'd been reading it to his boys every night as a bedtime story, and that their favorite part was when I recounted how the volcanos would boom and moments later you could see boulders bouncing down the mountainsides.

That was Jim. Booming and bouncing down mountainsides were two things he was always doing or always making plans to do. I can see him now, imploring us that no matter how terribly short our lives may be cut, we should always grab life with both hands, man, hold on tight, and enjoy the ride.