Changes in ten years

I would like to travel to Virginia this Fall to join with my brothers and watch W&L play football among the red and orange leaves and the cooler weather. It is quite a desire among the heat and humidity of August. Certainly something to be desired.

It has been over ten years since I drove to Lexington to enjoy the celebration of the two hundred and fifty year anniversary of my alma mater. That was a party and the last time I was together with my former roommate, Ken Smith, who died of liver cancer a few years later. He is buried in Roanoke, near his mother's family. His brothers are all alone together. Ken is gone. Their parents are gone.

The life I have now is so different from 1999. My grandmother is gone, died on December 2, 2000. My senior roommate is gone, having died around about that time. The three name partners in the law firm in which I worked for many years have all passed away. Most of the industry which used to run Griffin, Georgia is gone. My father is gone, having died on July 13, 2009. The world is so different, having changed in so many ways on the morning of December 11, 2001.

I remember that day. We were arising to drive back home from Bayou Lacombe. We had participated in Cindy's grandmother's funeral in Metarie. We met at the funeral home and discussed her passing. Later, we drove to the cemetary and parked our cars to take her ashes to a crypt where they had opened the window of the crypt to accomodate her ashes. A burial in New Orleans is different.

As most people know, they can not bury people below the surface because of the water table. So everyone is buried above ground in the many crypts and mausoleums located in the cemetaries. It is very different from a burial in the other parts of the country, where a hole is dug and the box lowered into the ground, a stone to mark his place of burial. Instead, the ashes are taken and placed within the crypt with a notation on the stone tablet which covers the place of rest.

After the service, we ate supper together and then waited for the next day when we would return to Georgia. But the events of the morning of September 11th changed all that. After watching the planes crash into the towers and hear of the other planes in Pennsylvania and Washington DC, and see the towers tumble in New York, we packed the car and headed east on I-10 toward Mobile.

I remember stopping to fill the car with gas and talking with the clerk, who didn't know anything about the terrorist acts; she had been working for the entire time of the events. No one had come in to buy gas with the news, until we came. Then later, in South Alabama, we stopped again to get gas and a snack and ran into some National Guard soldiers who were coming back from dove shoots to serve their country. Later, when we passed the Atlanta Airport, it was strange to drive past and not see any planes taking off or landing at the busiest airport in the USA.

Many things changed after that. I would have to say that there has been quite a change in my life since 1999. Many changes. Some good. Many bad. Still, Kate has completed her college degree. Cindy has a job which doesn't stress her as before. I have my own business and have learned much over the past nine years. I'm not there, perhaps, but I am learning.

I had a client come to my office back around 2003. He had started as a nuclear engineer in Florida. At the time, he was a general contractor in the area. We were talking in my office one morning. The topic of mistakes came up and he gave a bit of philosophy on it. He said, "Everybody makes mistakes. Its what you learn from your mistakes that is important."

Boy, isn't that true?