If I had company, I’d buy furniture

I don’t get much company.

My son, James, drops by once a week for Stupid Movie Night. (This week’s showing was Maximum Overdrive, written and directed by Stephen King, who must never be allowed to direct again. Sorry, Steve.)

In the summer months, my daughter visits every few weeks. Aubreii generally has anywhere from two-to-five grandkids in tow. This is pretty much pro forma when G-pa lives in a house overlooking the beach.

That’s about it. The rest of the time, I’m here alone.

I have friends, but not the kind who swing by for a beer. They’re work friends; guys I perform with in my weekend bar band. I love ‘em, but I see enough of them on weekends. I mean, there’s only so many conversations I can have about 1) girls we have known, 2) drugs we took for fun back in the ‘80s, 3) drugs we take now for high blood pressure, 4) who’s still playing the wrong damn chord on the bridge of “Into the Mystic,” and 5) other girls we have known.

Of course, this time of year I have almost no company because my house is virtually inaccessible. As I’ve mentioned before, I live atop a fairly precipitous hill; the driveway is steep and twisty and can’t really be plowed effectively. Even a thin scrim of ice is enough to make ascending it impossible.

The back entrance is worse. There’s no drive, just a long, narrow, vine-covered stairway (usually buried beneath snow and ice to the point of invisibility). Anyone attempting to approach from that direction will likely not be found until spring and heaven knows what sort of condition their body will be in by then.

There are yogis living in caves on Tibetan mountainsides who are more easily reached. I feel I should have some sort of “meaning of life” wisdom to impart to anyone who actually does make it to my front door, just so they won’t feel cheated. I’ve been debating between “Have patience with all things but first of all with yourself” and “Hang in there, baby!”

I’m fortunate in that I’ve lived my life in such a way that folks rarely expect wisdom to spout forth when I open my mouth. So I’ll probably go with the “hang in there” thing. It’s shorter and more easily inscribed onto the plastic key-chains I plan to sell at the Mountaintop Yogi Gift Shop.

You’d think I’d get lonely here, all by myself. You’d be right. I do.

But no more than a lot of people are lonely. Everybody’s got a hard luck story to tell and mine is no worse than anyone else’s, not nearly as bad as most, in fact. At least by my estimation.

Also, on the plus side, my lack of visitors means I don’t have to do anything about my furniture situation. I have exactly two pieces of nice furniture: my bed and my piano stool. Everything else is junk.

Instead of a sofa, I bought a futon. The thinking was this would give me some fold-out sleeping space when the kids visited for a weekend. The problem is, the futon is the second most uncomfortable place to sit in the world.

The first is my armchair, which was already here when I moved into the house. It’s a wing-back thing with oak trim, situated in a brutally upright position perfect for an elderly, 90-pound woman sitting primly with a cup of tea balanced delicately over her lap.

Drop a 200-pound guy with a beer and cheeseburger into that same chair on Super Bowl Sunday and you can be arrested for practicing sadism without a license. All the chair requires is a couple restraining straps to qualify as a medieval torture device. Prisoners have been electrocuted in more comfortable chairs.

Then there’s my dining room set, which also came with the house. It’s true “cottage furniture.” Circa 1966, hard, inexpensive wood and Formica with lots of loose joints and scuffed surfaces. In the 1966 Sears catalog, I’m sure this table was listed under “Shotgun Shack Home Furnishings.”

But it gives me someplace to eat my eggs and bagel in the morning, so I’m not complaining.

I should point out all this furniture is just fine for me, living here by myself. I’m not particularly fussy and despite the thrift shop decor, the place remains cute and cozy. I love it a lot.

But if I’m ever asked to host the Lake Association Formal Cotillion, I’m going to have to do a little shopping first. Maybe it’s just as well I don’t have much company.

Sports are too risky

Sports are dangerous. Football, hockey, online dating. You play long enough, odds are you’re gonna wind up hurt.

In these, my declining years, when I can injure myself without picking up a ball or hitting a puck, I don’t play sports.

As a kid, I tried my hand at baseball and football; I stunk at both. In high school, there was cross-country, but I only did that so I could hang out with my girlfriend, Corky, who was a serious runner. Once she dumped me, I dumped cross-country.

In addition to stinking at sports, I also seem to lack whatever competitive gene some people possess, that “spark” that prompts them to push themselves, to work, to “just do it,” to sweat and strain and … lordy, I’m exhausted just writing about it.

Fortunately, there are sports for guys like me. Bowling. Golf. Darts. Sports that involve beer and deep-fried food.

As with all sports, I stink at bowling, golf and darts. I play them anyway because, well, beer. It has a way of making whether I win or lose seem less important.

Also, it’s hard to injure yourself at a bowling alley or golf course. Darts, likewise, can’t really be described as high-risk. I mean, you might get unintentionally stuck by some newbie with more darts than sense, but generally speaking, it’s safer than hockey. As evidence, I’ll note here that dart players usually have all their front teeth. And if they don’t, odds are they didn’t lose them throwing darts.

That said, I’ll admit that years ago I nearly lost not only my teeth, but my life over a game of darts.

It was at a little West Side bar during the height of the dart league craze. I’d gotten involved in darts in order to – surprise, surprise – hang out with a cute brunette who played on a league. Laurie was no better at darts than I was, but it was something to do on a Tuesday night.

I’d done OK during the early evening league matches, limiting my intake to one Bud Lite per game, which I knew from experience left me able to continue finding the board with my dart right up until closing time.

Most of the league players had gone home, but Laurie and I hung out to practice afterward with a few friendly games between the two of us.

When the big guy asked me if I wanted a quick game of Cricket, I should have said no. Laurie was ready to leave, as was I. But the guy was insistent.

“Just one game,” he said. “C’mon.”

I couldn’t argue with that kind of logic.

To keep it interesting, we bet a beer on the game. I didn’t expect to win; the guy had a set of fancy darts in a leather case that looked pricier than my car.

But I did. Win, I mean. It was just blind luck, but I beat the guy badly.

“One more game,” he said, as I dropped in the last triple-twenty for a win. “Five bucks on this one.” The guy, who had a posse of buddies with him, was not going to take no for an answer. Since he was built like a clenched fist with a face designed to strike fear into any cellmate unlucky enough to share space with him, I agreed.

While he warmed up, I went up to the bar and bought another beer.

“Hey, pal,” the bartender said. “I wouldn’t be too quick to beat that guy.”

“No?”

“No. That’s Derek Newmann,” the bartender said, lowering his voice. (I’m changing the name here because the guy might still be alive and I’m still scared of him.) Turns out I was playing darts with the state’s top-ranked kick-boxer, a guy with a long history of trouble with the law, mostly assault charges.

My strong tendency toward self-preservation kicked in and I actively tried to lose the next game. Incredibly, I didn’t. Even when I barely aimed, my traitorous darts seemed determined to fly right into those doubles and triples.

Suggesting Derek needn’t pay me the five bucks was a mistake. He took it as an insult. I think he took most everything as an insult.

Derek and his crew followed us out. They stood in the entryway looking at me the way wolves look at a wounded doe, trying to decide if I were worth the effort.

I was real happy when my car pulled away with me in it, still alive, still with all my teeth. It was a long time before I went back on the West Side. After that, I gave up the darts league.

Sports are too dangerous.

I’d battle Everest for Captain Crunch

“Because it’s there” always seemed to me a stupid reason to climb a mountain. A burning house may “be there” too, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to walk into one. If I see a large pile of collie droppings at the park, I don’t feel compelled to step in them simply because of their proximity and physical reality.

Some things are meant to be avoided. Like mountains.

Yet sometimes, life forces us to step in that poo, walk into that burning building. Climb that mountain.

Such was the case for me yesterday.

As I mentioned last week, I broke my leg recently while trying to remove fallen branches from the roof. They were numerous, since my little house is surrounded by large, evergreen-type trees, each more malicious than that apple tree that waylaid Dorothy during her trek to Oz.

The doctor at the emergency room ordered me to keep the leg elevated for a week or two. At first blush, this sounds like advice I would be happy to hear. I mean, feet up, TV remote and a couple good books close at hand, maybe a bottle of wine to augment the pain meds … I could spend a week like that.

The reality turned out to be somewhat less festive.

Living alone, as I do, means just that: I’m alone. It didn’t take me long to realize that every trip to the kitchen for a glass of water, every meal prepared or dish washed equates to about 20 minutes of pain from a leg that’s supposed to be resting quietly on a pillow.

It got old fast. But the worst of it (so far) was that after a few days, I ran out of food. I was down to nuking the last few permafrost-encrusted bowls of leftover chicken soup I’d squirreled away in the freezer last March.

My mind kept straying to the car, buried somewhere beneath a foot of ice and snow at the at the top of the driveway. The snow in the driveway – the long, curvy, incredibly-unsafe-for-human-use driveway – also was about a foot deep.

But at the bottom lay the open road that leads to the grocery store, where they sell chicken pot pies and sausages and Captain Crunch and potatoes and beer; all the things I had run out of days earlier.

Eventually, the allure of food free of freezer burn won out.

The prep work I put into my expedition would have impressed Sir Edmund Hillary. I covered my cast with plastic to keep the water and snow out; I attached metal ice-gripper things to the bottom of my left shoe; I bundled as if the top of Everest really were my destination.

It took me 10 minutes to hobble down the steps to the “staging area” at the top of my ludicrous rollercoaster of a driveway, another 15 to clear away the ice and snow that had accumulated on the car. By this time my broken leg was singing “Ave Maria” in a very high key.

It took some rocking back and forth, but I got the car rolling. Due to the steep incline, the car eventually lurched forward.

Home free. So I thought, until I came around the last bend and saw what the snowplow guys had left me. Now, no one appreciates clear roads more than I do, and I know all that snow has got to go somewhere. I’m just not sure why that “somewhere” has to be the foot of my long and already-perilous driveway.

But there it was. A wall that would repel more illegal immigrants than anything Trump might have in mind.

It was too late. I couldn’t go back. Using my left foot to work the pedals, I attempted to perform a maneuver I once saw on “The Dukes of Hazzard.”

This story might have ended with me dead in the front seat, frozen or starved to death. Instead, my wonderful neighbors who live in the corner house arrived with shovels and, more importantly, youth, to help dig me out.

I assisted as I could, which basically entailed slipping on the ice and landing on the leg I had broken only days earlier. Also, I had to WALK back up the looooong drive to fetch a bag of driveway salt. And then down again.

By the time the car was returned to solid pavement, my leg had abandoned “Ave Maria” and had moved on to “Bohemian Rhapsody” in a key even higher than the one Freddy Mercury sang it in.

Home from the grocery, I parked out back, at the bottom of the snow-covered, trackless hill. I managed to make it from the car to the house without the help of a Sherpa, rope or regularly-spaced pitons, but it took a while.

So if you’re walking around the lake this summer and happen to see an old guy sitting at the top of a very tall hill sipping a margarita and enjoying the sun on his face, just know this: I earned it, baby.

I earned it.

Breaking branches and bones

Two-hundred-six.

That’s how many bones there are in the adult human body. That leaves me with 204 I have yet to break.

Like most everyone else in town, last week’s climatological fun and games left me with no power, no warm water and – by far the most serious crisis – no Wi-Fi. I lasted a day before I made arrangements to stay elsewhere for a while. I do not come from hardy pioneer stock.

When the twister had passed and Auntie Em again poked her head up from the root cellar, I returned home. But instead of finding the real-life counterparts of the Cowardly Lion, Tin Man and Scarecrow, I found trees. Lots and lots of trees, all scattered across the roof of my little lake house.

On the bright side, my furnace and water heater were back in business. The pump that carries water away from the house (there’s a name for the thing, but I don’t know what it is) was kaput. Fortunately, workers from Greenville’s excellent Water Department not only know what that pump is called, but they showed up an hour or so after I reported the problem. They fixed it.

For all intents and purposes, I had rejoined civilization. I tried the internet and it was still there, exactly as I remembered it from four days earlier. My streaming TV services were intact, though the programming had not improved. Still no free “X-files” reruns.

Despite the limited television offerings, I was glad to have things back to normal.

I charged my Kindles, my phone, my watch, my iPad, my laptop; all the things which, before the power outage, I had taken for granted. I threw out the food that might have gone bad from spending four days in a room temperature refrigerator and replaced it with new food from the grocery.

I opened a bottle of pinot noir, put on fuzzy pants and prepared to settle in for the night, comfortable and secure in my little lakeside paradise. The wind outside howled, but I was cozy and warm.

I tried to ignore the sounds coming from the roof, the scraping and rumbling of branches scudding against tiles and vinyl siding. I tried to relax.

But as I sat there on the sofa, trying to get into a book my daughter recommended, I started thinking about those branches. Some of them were big, maybe eight inches around, 10 to 15-feet long.

I lack any sort of forestry experience, but my guess was some of the branches were pretty darn heavy. And like I said, there were a lot of them up there.

Snow was falling, steadily adding to the weight. The creaking sounds I heard, as of ceiling joists slowly buckling beneath great pressure, may have been only my imagination. Then again, maybe not.

I did not rest easy that first night back, though the pinot helped.

The next day I decided to be proactive, something I rarely do unless there’s a good chance 15,000 pounds of lumber are going to fall through the roof and kill me in my sleep.

I got up early (which, in these post-retirement days means noon), bundled up in a half-dozen layers of winter-resistant fabric, and headed out back armed with a shovel, a small electric chainsaw and a ladder. Now, anyone who has read this column before is already aware those tools are, for me, the trifecta of death. In a perfect world, it would be against the law for me to own any tool more dangerous than a corkscrew.

I placed the ladder against the side of the house, plugged in the chainsaw, secured the small snow shovel to my belt with a carabiner – so I’d only have to make one trip up the ladder – and proceeded to climb.

One rung, two rungs … there was no third rung. None that my foot made contact with, at any rate. The snapping sound I heard when I hit the ground was all too familiar. My right leg this time.

A 200-foot, hilly crawl through drifting snow got me to my car, which got me to the Spectrum emergency room, which got me to a doctor, who fixed my leg (or at least set it on the path to healing).

Linda, one of my neighbors from the other side of the lake, put me in touch with a guy who knows how to operate ladders, shovels and chainsaws without breaking any bones. The branches will soon be gone. And in four-to-five weeks, my leg will again be fully functional.

While I wait, I’ll use the internet to discover new and exciting bits of knowledge. Like how many bones there are in the adult human body.

There are changes swirling in the widening gyre

“Come senators, congressmen, please heed the call / Don’t stand in the doorway don’t block up the hall / For he that gets hurt will be he who has stalled / There’s a battle outside and it is ragin’ / It’ll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls / For the times they are a-changin’” – Bob Dylan

I remember the first time I heard that song, way back in ’64. I was just a kid at the time; girls, shaving and puberty were still years distant. I had heard the word “politics,” but had no idea what it meant. Even so, that song spoke to me on a level I couldn’t begin to understand.

The years sped by beneath the nightly televised specter of Vietnam as I edged ever closer to the age when I, too, would be required to register for the draft.

Was I scared? Hell, yes, I was scared. I did not want to return home in one of those flag-draped caskets I saw on TV every night. I did not want to die for a cause that made no sense to me.

Neither did a lot of young men; some died anyway, including some I called friends. Others protested, raising their voices against a war they saw as senseless. Because of their voices – in part, at least – the war in Vietnam wound down just as I was reaching draft age. I registered but was never inducted.

I later joined up on my own. I liked the military but was never particularly good at being a soldier. I just wanted to serve my country, like my old man, my Uncle Ray, my grandfather, my great-grandfather; all served at one time or another.

But even during my time in uniform I remained thankful to those protestors. The kids gunned down at Kent State, the 100,000 who filled the streets of Washington, D.C. in ’67, the millions more who gathered across the nation … it’s possible I – and a lot of other guys my age – are alive today because those protestors made their voices heard in a way that would not be silenced.

Don’t get me wrong, I never sided with the idiots who spit on our returning troops or screamed “baby killer” from the cozy safety of the sidelines. Too many of my friends and relatives were among those in uniform and I knew them to be good people.

To this day, our Vietnam vets don’t get the respect they earned and deserve, though things are improving. Still, too little, too late, in my opinion.

And now this country is swept up in another polarizing storm. This time the war’s in our own backyard, in our schoolyards, classrooms, hallways. Though the venue has changed, the body bags remain the same. The tears, the televised sobs of parents who will never again see a son, a daughter; the ineffectual, corrupt politicians who extend hopes and prayers rather than meaningful legislation.

For those of us who lived through the Vietnam era, it’s all eerily familiar.

The kind of folks who mistake Facebook memes for wisdom claim that out of every bad thing a good thing comes. I’m not sure that’s true. All the protests over Vietnam, the war itself, the civil rights movement that was happening at the same time; it could be argued they helped birth a better nation than the one we had before; more tolerant, enlightened, equal.

But it was a painful, bloody birth. Was it all worth it? Historians may know; I do not.

I just know it did my heart good to see the recent news photos of those young protestors in Washington and around the country. They’re mad as hell and they should be. To borrow from Yeats, there’s a rough beast running loose in this country and for too long nobody’s done a thing to stop it. Maybe this is the start. Maybe this is the loosened pebble that will grow into an avalanche.

Again, I don’t know. You could fit all the wisdom I possess into a thimble and still have room for your thumb. I don’t know any more about politics now than I did back when Dylan wrote that song.

I own guns myself and not the sort one uses for hunting. But just like in the sixties, I’m sick of seeing body bags. Something’s got to change.

If our leaders lack the courage to make a stand, maybe it’s time history repeats itself. For the first time in a long time I think I feel the ground beginning to swell beneath me.

A change is coming.

MTaylor325@gmail.com

(616) 745-9530

Certain professions should require mandatory uniforms, I believe

She was one of the most striking women I’d ever seen. Undulating, ink-black hair trailing like dark rain over delicate shoulders, eyes greener than a St. Patrick’s Day in Dublin, a shape that might have prompted the Pope to look twice. Her voice was pure music, avian poetry, even when competing with the noise of the crowded bar.

I wasn’t in love, but I figured I would be within the next 20 minutes or so.

And here she was, sitting with some girlfriends at the club in which my little bar band was working. Every guy in the joint cast furtive glances her way – except for those who simply stared openly: hungry wolves contemplating a wounded lamb.

To her credit, she seemed unaware (and unimpressed) by the attention. My guess was she had grown used to it.

The band went on break and I said hi as I walked past her table; too smooth and cool to actually be hitting on anyone, y’know, just an employee of the bar being polite and all that. That’s the vibe I was going for, at least.

Maybe I hit my mark, maybe not, but one of the young ladies at the table stopped me and requested a song. It was her sister Mary’s favorite, she said. Mary, as in the raven-haired beauty of my dreams to whom I was currently not paying any special attention. There’s an art to this sort of thing and though I was at the time a clumsy practitioner, I at least knew which end of the brush to dip into the paint.

I turned to Mary, planning to say something charming and witty, but my voice got all tangled up around my heart somewhere. Seeing her up close made my knees go all funny. I struggled mightily to hide this, and failed.

“Um, yeah, we can do that tune,” I said. Everyone can do that tune. But nobody wants to. Not even Van Morrison, who wrote it and has probably made millions off the thing. It’s one of the most hated – and most requested – songs in the bar band business. Not as hated as “Freebird,” but real close. But for Mary, I’d have happily beat the tune out on my skull with a rubber mallet.

“Oh, thank you so much,” Mary said, taking my hand in hers for the briefest of moments.

What I wanted to say was, “It’s my pleasure! I love you. Will you marry me?” What I actually said was, “No problem.”

I made to stumble away to the bar, where I hoped a small shot of whisky might serve to steady my knees. Mary had other ideas.

“Would you like to join us?” she said.

I felt it took me waaaay too long to process her words and respond, but it was probably only a few clumsy seconds.

“Uh, sure, thanks,” I stammered. I sent up a quick prayer of thanks, grateful I had chosen music over plumbing as a lifelong profession. Plumbers rarely get invited to join a table of beautiful women, although they make considerably more money than do guitar players.

Mary and I spent the next 20 minutes chatting, laughing. Her direct gaze was disconcerting, disorienting, but I soon fell into the rhythm of our conversation and even managed to scare up a little wit and charm after all.

I went so far as to break my long-established rule and buy a round for the table. That left me broke, but Mary was worth it. I even liked her friends, or family, as the case must have been. Two of them, after all, repeatedly referred to her as “sister.”

And I suppose you can see where this is going. Mary was a sister, all righty. A Catholic sister. A nun. I figured it out just before going back onstage for second set.

My memories of nuns, accumulated while attending St. Isadore school as a child, are not good ones. In my youth, nuns were dark engines of rosary-fueled destruction; black-and-white bastions of God’s wrath, ready to unleash torrents of righteous punishment on any wayward fourth grader. I had been wayward a lot.

To my recollection, those nuns never dressed in “civilian” clothes and none looked anything like Mary. If they had, I’m sure my current math skills would be better than they are.

This all happened nearly 30 years ago. But I learned my lesson well: never buy drinks for married women, especially those married to deities.

MTaylor325@gmail.com

(616) 745-9530

MTRealityCheck.blogspot.com

Maybe someday I’ll be able to say goodbye, but not today

It was the first time I’d seen my son play baseball. Little League; the summer before he started middle school. Just a practice, not a game.

We’d never been sports guys, my son or I. Nothing against sports, the topic just never created much of a blip on the Taylor family radar. To the best of my recollection, the closest we ever came to sports was tossing a Frisbee at the beach. Which made it all the more impressive that Jordan was good. Real good.

His coach took me aside prior to the start of practice to complement me on all the work I’d put in with my son. He was surprised when I asked him what work he was talking about. Jordan was a natural. He could pitch, he could hit, he could run like the wind. None of that came from my side of the family.

But like I said, he was good. I stayed the entire practice. As the team ran through its exercises, Jordan kept watch on me from the corner of his eye, gauging my reaction, making sure I was paying attention. I was. I was about as proud as a father can be of his son.

I was proud of him long before that, though. Not for his sports prowess, but for something far more important: Jordan was a genuinely good kid, a good person. He had a big heart, a giving nature, empathy that stretched for miles. If the people around him weren’t happy, Jordan wasn’t happy.

By way of example, I began giving Jordan and his sister an allowance when he was six or seven. Just a couple bucks; a fortune to kids that age. That first week, he and Aubreii walked to a little gift shop two blocks from our front door. He came home with a small, plastic statue of a puppy. For me. He’d spent the first real money he’d ever had on a gift for me.

I still have that puppy and I hope to one day be buried with it.

Many years later, while working in New York City, Jordan risked his life to buy me a knock-off Rolex from a shady-looking guy in a truck parked in a back alley near Canal Street, home of shady-looking guys selling bootlegged luxury items. His phone went off while he was making the deal and the shady guy pulled a gun on him, thinking he might be a cop, or working for the cops. Jordan managed to convince him otherwise and purchased the “Rolex” for $45.

Why would my otherwise intelligent son do something so stupid? Because when he’d asked me if he could pick me up a souvenir from the Big Apple, I’d said, “Sure, get me a Rolex!”

It was a good knock-off, too. Even fooled the jeweler who resized the band for me. But it was nothing for which I was willing to risk my son’s safety. It was that important to Jordan, though, because he wanted to make me happy. He cared what I felt, what I thought of him.

He was like that.

Last Sunday, I listened as weeping friends and relatives shared similar stories. About how much he’d meant to them, how much kindness he’d shown over the years, how many people he had helped, how many lives he’d made better just by being the kind of guy he was.

The next day we buried him. He’d just turned 37 and the world is a poorer place without him in it.

His sister, younger brother and I perched on metal folding chairs in the cold, grey morning light of the cemetery as they lowered his casket into the frozen earth. The best of me went into that hole with him. I’d always thought of Jordan as the me I should have been; kinder, less self-absorbed, more caring. What sort of universe takes someone like him while someone like me lingers?

It’s not fair and I’m mad as hell. I don’t want to hear about faith, a “better place,” being called home … any of that. Maybe someday, not now. Now all I want is to see my boy again. For a day, an hour. A few minutes.

That’s not going to happen. Ever. And I just can’t come to grips with that.

I want to tell him, one last time, how much I love him. How proud I always was of him.  How much I’ve always cherished that plastic puppy statue, the video I shot that day at Little League practice, that damned Rolex.

But he’s gone where I can’t follow, that place where phone calls, texts, emails go forever unanswered. He’s gone. He’s gone. I could write that a million times and I still wouldn’t believe it.

I’ve had friends over the years who have lost children. I’ve never understood how they manage to go on. Now I know. You go on because you must, because you have no choice.

If you have little ones, even if they’re 37, don’t wait to tell them — to show them — how much they mean to you. We are, each of us, allotted only so many days on this green earth and when they’re gone, they’re gone for good. All we’re guaranteed is now, and even that is as ephemeral as an early morning’s mist tenuously clinging to a cornfield.

For my part, I plan to be better than I’ve been. Kinder, fairer, more loving. My son’s passing has left the world a little short on goodness. I hope to do my part to pick up that slack, in his memory. I don’t know how successful I’ll be at the task — God knows it doesn’t come naturally to me — but I want to try. For my boy.

MTaylor325@gmail.com

(616) 745-9530