Guess What Day It Is!!!!

That's right. It's the 62nd anniversary of the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima. Which means it's also Lola's and my "paper anniversary." We debated about getting married on this day, which in the end was dictated by our choice of location. We finally decided that people should do hopeful, optimistic things on August 6th, like the Japanese survivors who released the birds you see in the picture. So just think--one year ago today most of the readers of this blog were in the lobby of the Albuquerque Museum watching me enter into a binding legal contract of bliss with the love of my life. So thank you, Lola, for saying "I do." Thanks to all of you for helping to make the wedding such a blast and for staying in touch after our big move. And thanks to those who couldn't make it but were with us in spirit.

I guess when you pick Hiroshima Day to get married, you open yourself up to lots of jarring juxtapositions of life and death. Unfortunately, that's exactly how this anniversary turned out. I'd like to say goodbye to my Aunt Helen, who died this past weekend in Wichita just about two months shy of her eighty-ninth birthday. A year ago today, she was too frail to travel to Albuquerque, but she shared our celebration in her own way. Many generations of schoolkids in Wichita will remember her as an enthusiastic and engaging children's librarian. I'll always remember breakfasts in the screened-in porch of the house on Oliver street that she and her husband Orvel, who preceded her in death many years ago, shared when I was a boy.