Spring is life

I’m going to write about spring again. Sorry.

I’m in a low mood today. I don’t really have an explanation for it except that there’s a Latin Jazz CD playing on the old Sanyo music box, and it’s a clear, bright day from my window overlooking scenic Interstate 80. Inside my office, though, it’s hot, and the breeze I see rustling the leaves outside my window is giving me no relief.

It’s fitting that Memorial Day is in the spring. I was at a party the other night, and a friend complained that her son didn’t know the meaning of the holiday. I asked her its meaning, but she didn’t understand I was being my usual symbolic self, and she explained it to me in terms of soldiers’ sacrifices.

Death, it seems, is only a side of life, and in my span, it seems that of people I know who died, the ones I liked most died in the spring. My mom died in the spring, and I can name many others. My friend Don Dondero’s wife, Liz, passed away this spring, as did my old friend, Gloria Michaels Stein, of Christmas Tree restaurant fame. There will be a ceremony for Gloria at 11 a.m. on May 31 at Mountain View Cemetery, and a celebration of her life at the Christmas Tree on Mount Rose from 1-3 p.m.

My heart goes out to the families. I know what they are going through, and my family and associates here at the paper send out our thoughts and hopes that their pain will soon diminish.

As usual, the words seem to fail me. There’s nothing I can write that will ease anyone’s pain, particularly my own. The recognition of the season helps me most, the idea that I can bury my hands in the warm soil and place an apparently lifeless seed with the hopes that something will come of it. But I know that even if the seed should germinate, sprout and feed my stomach or my eyes, eventually, it’s going to return to the earth.

And so will I. And so will we all.