The last days of Ditchcat

I started smelling it on Wednesday, at first in quick bursts when the wind blew: The sour, thick stench of death somewhere in the yard. I was down by the driveway gate, putting a trash bag in the bin, and I noticed it and thought ew, something smells dead and got on with my business.

The next day, I smelled it again. I was on the deck, watering plants, and it hit me like a cartoon frying pan. “Something is definitely dead,” I told my husband when I came back inside. He agreed enthusiastically, as he had been smelling it too. And then we set about our speculation game, wild guesses without any clues, about which kind of living creature had perished and where. A mouse, a cat, a squirrel? A snake? A lizard?

On Friday I noticed a deflated mylar balloon in the overgrown flowerbed in the back yard. It was a big round yellow smiley face, attached to a long ribbon. Richard said he figured it had floated over from the neighbor’s yard. They’d had a party out in the yard the previous weekend. But my mind instantly went to a true-crime plot. A deflated happy face balloon and the stink of death. Was there a lost, dead toddler under our deck? Were we being framed for kidnapping and murder?

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My sister kept a pair of old, beat-up Keds in the stairwell to the loft at my parents’ house. One time she got the shoes out and slipped a foot inside and felt something wet and squishy. It was a dead mouse. We had been smelling that thing for days, and didn’t know where the smell was coming from.

We were amazed such a big smell could come from such a small animal.

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I had the day off of work on Friday so I had the entire afternoon to obsess about where the smell was coming from. It was hot and muggy and the smell had settled over the entire yard. It was clear that its epicenter was somewhere around the deck, near the ramp that leads from the deck to the back gate. Every time I went outside to look around for the few seconds I could stand it, the smell seemed worse. I noticed dozens of blow flies alighting on the boards lining the ramp and realized it had to be there, under the ramp. But I couldn’t see anything. And I wasn’t really about to get down there and start digging around, either. Every time I went outside, the mosquitoes made quick work of my flesh.

I marveled at how our dog hadn’t yet rolled in the thing or even located it, and pretty much the instant I uttered a positive sentiment about that fact, it changed. Sandy immediately, the next time she went out, pinpointed a spot near where the blow flies were swarming. But she didn’t get a chance to get after it before I coaxed her back inside. She had caught the smell, though, got the sickness, and she spent the rest of the afternoon whining and harassing me so I would let her back out so she could hunt the smell’s source. I relented, figuring delusionally that she deserved a pee break, and I instantly regretted it. She went under the deck and went after that spot and by the time I summoned her back up, she smelled of death and I had to haul her out into the front yard and soap her up and spray her with the hose. She did not like that, but she deserved it.

Richard came home and was still in his work clothes and, after seeing his wet dog and his crazed wife and smelling the foul air, he was understandably overcome with the desire to kick the problem’s ass. So, without any fanfare or mental preparation or signing any kind of waiver, he crawled underneath the deck to look around. And he finally saw it, wedged up as far as it could fit between the ramp and the ground.

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The first time I ever saw the house we would eventually live in, it was dark out. Richard drove me over to take a peek at it, and as we topped the hill of the driveway, our headlights came to rest on quite the scene: Dozens upon dozens of feral cats, scattering every which way from their makeshift home in a big carport (known in our house since that moment as “the cat barn”) built to house an RV owned by the previous occupant.

After the sale was final and we started moving in and ripping up carpet and painting, Richard was visited by the children of the former owners of the house, the only family that had ever lived there. They begged him to continue feeding the cats. Apparently they had been coming to the house, even though no one lived there and it was being sold to settle the estate, and leaving food for the army of stray cats.

Richard, who had two big cat-eating dogs, did not agree to continue feeding the stray cats and made clear that he didn’t want them to continue doing so either.

After we moved in and the dogs had the run of the back yard, the cat population shrank dramatically. We did see two cats, though, occasionally slinking through the neighborhood at any and all hours of the day. There was a grey one I nicknamed General Lee in some self-referential, meta joke about my problematic and wayward Southern heritage, and a black one who always seemed to be lurking in a ditch. We called that one Ditchcat.

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Richard emerged from under the deck and showed me a picture he had snapped while on his belly beneath the deck. Sure enough, it was a damned cat wedged under there. A big black one. Ditchcat.

“I have to get it out,” he said. I wasn’t so sure. Couldn’t we just let it decompose naturally, go back to the earth, even if it meant we never used the back yard ever again?

My husband, who is an ass kicker, was having none of that. He got a big shovel and a trash can and some bags and his post-hole digger and went about nudging and pulling the cat out of its final resting place. He felt bad that the only way he could get a good grip was using the post-hole digger to grab the cat’s head. It seemed disrespectful.

He used a big stick to turn the cat over onto the shovel and realized with horror at just how bloated and distended the animal’s belly was. It had been sitting out there in the heat, ballooning up, getting ready to pop. I begged him to go get something to protect his face and hands in case the worst possible thing — a cat-gut explosion — happened.

But a cat-gut explosion did not happen. Richard shoveled the poor thing into the trash can and then we worked together to double, then triple, bag it to try to cut down on the smell. We placed the triple-bagged cat inside a box and ran back inside the house to scrub off the top layer of our skin.

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The next day we went outside and the smell was still so strong apparently one of our neighbors had wandered up our walkway to check on us, according to another neighbor who has her finger on the pulse of the neighborhood. We quadruple- and quintuple-bagged the cat and put it in our trash can and despaired about what to do.

“Trash pickup isn’t until Tuesday,” Richard said. “That’s more than 72 hours that this thing is going to sit in here and fester.” He thought we should put it in the trunk and take it somewhere. A landfill. Throw it into the ocean, maybe.

“That thing is not going in my trunk,” I told him. “Even if there are seventeen bags around it, my car will smell like death for the rest of my life. The resale value will plummet!”

We stood there in the driveway, our nostrils flaring with every burst of stink that moved with the wind. It occurred to me that there were dead things of all sizes, all around us, at all times, whether or not we knew it. I thought about that tiny mouse in my sister’s shoe and how the whole house had smelled because of something smaller than my palm.

How did the whole world, every corner of it, not stink of death at all times?

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On Monday, Richard added another bag and sealed it tight, then wheeled the trash can to the curb. The smell was still intoxicatingly awful. It didn’t matter how many layers we put between that dead cat and the world.

When Richard came back up the hill, I was waiting for him in the car. We were going out to get sushi.

“Wouldn’t it be hilarious if some drunk driver careened down our street overnight and hit our trash can and sent that thing sailing through the air only to splatter in our front yard?”

He laughed, thank God.

Every ending is a twist

A lady I work with died. Just up and died, 48 years old, after a stint in the hospital to have a procedure done. Details are scant. She was a sweet woman, great to work with, and now she is dead. Not because of anything she did, any risk she took or bad decision she made, but because of the unfortunate convergence of some random circumstances. She leaves a husband and a couple of children, both young adults. She leaves a cubicle that will have to be cleaned out, and her boss, who is also my boss, will get her forwarded emails. We will chip in for flowers and gift cards for meals for her family. Someone has hung a sign saying “rest in peace, friend” on the outside of her cube.

There was no wind-up or wind-down. She is just gone.

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Lately I’m a horrible backseat driver. If I am not driving, I am a ball of anxiety, all nervous energy, convinced every time our car passes or gets passed that this is it, this is how it ends. My fingers tense and grab at the seat or the door handle. My foot presses into the empty floorboard to mash the invisible brake, my brain so desperate for control that it requires I pantomime driving to quiet it. My imagination, as I sit primly in the passenger seat and practice the same breathing pattern I used during childbirth, feeds me a steady stream of quick and elaborate daydreams involving eighteen-wheelers plowing into us without even seeing us, our car flipping through the air and down embankments, hungry flames licking everything I can see, watery landings where the outside pours in so quickly you can’t believe it or get out of its way. I wonder where should I put my phone to make sure I can access it easily if we crash, to call someone, anyone, for help. Is this bridge going to collapse under us and would I be able to get my kid out of his booster seat in time were we to land somehow unscathed? Could I break a window with my bare feet? Would we suffocate slowly? What if my glasses fall off or my contacts come out and I am blind and cannot find him? How do we get away from the car so it doesn’t suck us underwater with it? Can I save him? Am I strong enough? Am I too out of shape? Could I live with myself if I failed him?

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A few months ago a guy I used to work with, sort of, died. He fell off a building while taking photographs in a restricted area and plummeted to his death. He was a real lust-for-life kinda guy and all of a sudden he was dead. He left one final prophetic Instagram post that, all things considered, was a good one to go out on. It was hard to process, even though I wasn’t close to him. He left behind several children.

There was no wind-up or wind-down. He was just gone.

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I think about it all the time. Every day I walk past forklifts and heavy machinery and I think Is this the day this stuff randomly explodes and a piece of metal zips through my temple? It’s sort of funny that my mind even goes there, when it’s much more likely that I will die from cancer or heart disease or, shit, a mass shooting. And yet. Once you realize your mortality, it’s like playing a lifelong game of hide and seek. Three, two, one… Ready or not.

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The older you get the more death you encounter. It’s a numbers game. You advance in age and people who are older than you die at an alarming clip. Then death comes for the people your age. It’s the random tragic deaths at first but then the hospital deaths and heart attacks and suicides. Suddenly death isn’t so abstract anymore; it’s more like Whack-a-Mole and you’re one of the moles, totally at the mercy of the spring under your feet.

You would think it would create a sense of comfort with the concept but I find it to make it all the more terrifying.

I have long been fine with Death as a literary concept, Death as a metaphor. It’s super clean and useful in storytelling. Universally understood. A gateway to greater understanding of Life.

Death, however, the real deal: It scares the shit out of me. How can one ever be ready for the one thing no living person has ever experienced?

Some folks get right with God and they prepare to go to Heaven and that makes it easier for them. This world is not my home, they say. That has never appealed to me. This world is my home and the only one I’ve been guaranteed. I’ve been so fortunate to have been granted the entirely improbable privilege of existence, and I am not sure I’ll ever be ready to be done with it because this life I’ve been gifted contains infinite joy, pain, sorrow, gratitude, and chances to be kind, chances to create.

Life is the best thing. It’s the only thing the living know.

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A year or two ago a woman I only knew on social media died in a car crash right after Thanksgiving. She and I ran in related circles in Memphis and she seemed really fun and funny. She commented on my Instagram posts and I commented on hers. Then she was dead. I spent hours reading the emotional tributes her friends and family wrote on her Facebook page.

She never got to see that stuff.

There was no wind-up or wind-down. She was just gone.

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I thought I wanted to die when I was a freshman in college. Something struck me low and wouldn’t let up and I thought if I ate a bunch of sleeping pills I could dry up and blow away like a leaf. Instead I was just very drowsy for much of the spring semester. To this day I don’t know if that’s what I really wanted or if that was just an overly dramatic way for me to be sad about the death of certain parts of myself as I became a young adult.

It went away and now it’s hard for me to understand who I was then to be so foolish with the life I’d been given. I know what I felt was real. But I also know that the 36-year-old version of me is much more forgiving of low moods.

They don’t always mean I need to hit eject.

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Holden knows about death. He asks me when I am going to die and I don’t lie to him. Hopefully not for a long time, buddy. “But you will die before me, but when I’m a grownup?” More than likely. He doesn’t like that answer.

But he accepts it.

So long, Margaret Jean

My grandmother died Oct. 10. She’d spent the last few arduous months in and out of the hospital and back to the nursing home, then back to the hospital, battling rounds of infections and pain that kept her from resting peacefully enough to heal. She had fallen and hurt her shoulder and spine a couple of months ago and it just snowballed from there. She’d been in declining health for a couple of years, her hearing and sight deteriorated to the point where she needed you to get up real close and yell in her face for her to know who you were and what you were saying.

It was a frustrating end for a woman so independent.

She was ready to go, though. That’s what she said when I visited her a month or so before she died. She had just been discharged from the hospital and moved into her new room at the nursing home. She hadn’t yet realized that she wasn’t going back to her house ever again. I think she suspected but she wasn’t ready to believe it. She missed her dog, Sal. My aunt brought him by sometimes to visit.

Grandmaw told me she was proud of her life, that she’d had a good, full life. And she was ready to meet Jesus. She seemed in decent spirits that day, enough to flirt with the cute young physical therapist wearing a pink shirt. But she seemed resigned, too. It was hard to hear, hard to see, hard to move. She had hurt her shoulder in her fall so badly that coughing — which she desperately needed to do to get over a sinus and chest infection — was excruciating.

I’ve been a terrible granddaughter the past few years. My own life’s twists and turns ate up all my time and energy and I didn’t make the effort to call or visit as much as I should have. But I think she knew I loved her. And that Holden loved her. She and he had something special. She cracked him up like no one else could.

A boy and his Grandmaw #latergram

My grandmother was an incredible woman. She was independent, strong-willed, adventurous, so funny, creative, community-minded. She was complex, and at times difficult. Like we all can be.

She touched so many lives in her years. She inspired me to think bigger, to explore, to laugh.

I have written a lot about her here, and I am so glad I have many of my own memories as well as a handful of her stories written down.

Her marriage to my grandfather. Her miscarriage. The demands of mother- and wifehood. The year she was grand marshal of the River Day parade and it literally rained on her parade. (Spoiler alert: She got a do-over several years later!)

I just went back through some posts and re-remembered some things she told me that I had forgotten.

And I reread this, about how the things in our lives that we love change so drastically with age: “Growing up is just this seemingly endless reel of the things you loved crumbling, sometimes slowly, and that is the part of adulthood that I am not handling very well.”

It’s been seven years since I wrote that, and things have changed even more since then. I’ve made my own family now, and watched my birth family go through painful changes and challenges. Grandmaw got to meet my husband, although by then she had a hard time remembering him very well. She was pleased that I had found someone who treated my son and me so well. She understood how hard it was to find a good man.

When I remember my grandmother, it’s a collection of memories and sounds and smells punctuated by random snippets of things that made her who she was:

• Her collection of turquoise and coral jewelry, which I found especially beautiful and interesting. She would bring it out of her jewelry boxes and let me see it and touch it sometimes as a child.
• The candy she kept on her nightstand: Skittles, candy orange slices, Smarties.
• Sunflowers, her favorite.
• Her homemade mac and cheese, slightly burnt on top.
• The clanging of her bangles and bracelets as she moved her hands.
• Her fingernails, thick as particle board from the calcium pills she took religiously.
• Nutter Butters, slightly stale and chewy.
• The way she said “shit.” Either a short spit — “shhht” — or a long E sound, quick in the middle — “sheeeit.” She Clay Davised before Clay Davis did.
• The dirty frog figurines she’d picked up on her travels somewhere; they looked unremarkable on the shelf but if you turned them over, one had a penis and one had a vagina.
• Trips to Goody’s in Jackson to buy school clothes.
• Eating at Long John Silver’s.
• The souvenirs she brought back from her travels for us kids: A letter opener from the UK, Australian money, a keychain from Ireland. My sister kept a bundle of postcards she’d sent from various locales over the years and put them in her casket to take with her to her next destination.
• The car stacked high with styrofoam plates of meals to be delivered to shut-ins.
• The 1990s U.S. Census kit she let me play with after the census was over. It was a plastic briefcase full of survey papers. I would conduct pretend census surveys in my room.
• The homemade spooky stories book she and one of her classes made, bound in an orange and black casing that my little hands always went for on the bookshelf.
• The oil paints and brushes she handed down to me years ago, and the landscapes she painted.

That’s not all. That’s not even close.

How do you even begin to catalogue what a person means to you? Who they are? How much they are a part of you in ways you’re only just learning? In ways you won’t see yet for years?

Rest well, Margaret Jean. You were one of a kind.

me and grandmaw

grandmaw and me

phil, me, grandmaw

crunk

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So it doesn’t get lost in the ether of the internet, here’s her obituary:

Margaret Jean Sanders Turner, 85, of Saltillo, TN, passed away Tuesday, October 10th, at Decatur Co. General Hospital.

Mrs. Turner was born in Friendship, TN, the youngest child of the late Bob and Lottie Hall Sanders. She graduated from Friendship High School and was in the last class of the UT Junior College at Martin in 1951. She also attended Lambuth and Memphis State. She met Bobby Turner, her late husband, in college and they married in 1953. They lived in the Five Forks Community just outside Saltillo. Mr. Turner passed away in 1993.

Margaret was very active in and around Saltillo. She had taught Elementary School at Saltillo, was Registrar-at-Large with the Hardin County Election Commission, worked at H.I.S., was secretary for the Town of Saltillo at one time. She had also worked with the Federal Census Bureau for over three decades. She had volunteered with the Hardin County Tourism Committee, as well as the Pictorial History of Hardin County Book committee, she was one of the organizers of the “River Day” Homecoming Parade, helped organize the area Meals on Wheels Program, She served 10 years as a local fire fighter and state certified First Responder. Mrs. Turner had served as secretary/treasurer for the Saltillo Family and Community Education Club, treasurer and member of Saltillo United Methodist Church, a certified AARP Driver Safety Instructor, Advisory Board member of SWHRA Foster Grandparents, and for years, she wrote the community news for the Savannah Courier. She had been a member of the Soggy Bottom Belles Red Hatters. Her greatest interests were the history of Saltillo, her family geneology, her flowers and dearest of all, her family.

Margaret is survived by a daughter, Cindy (Jacky) Chumney, of Parsons; a son, Steven S. (Frances) Turner, of Saltillo.

She is also survived by 5 Grandchildren – Krissie (Chuck) Tucker, Lindsey (Richard) Turner-Garrett, Keri (Randy) Inman, Evan Turner and Tyler Chumney; 6 Great-Grandchildren – Casey Collins, Patrick Collins, Holden Karpovage, Levi Turner, Kalanie Inman and Rylie Inman; 3 special friends – Roger Gant, Patsy Gant and Diego Porras.

She was predeceased by her parents, Bob Berry & Lottie Hall Sanders, her husband, Bobby Newman Turner, a daughter, Susan Belinda Turner and a brother, William Robert Sanders.

Her Funeral Service will be held at Saltillo United Methodist Church, Saltillo, TN, at 1 PM on Friday, October 13th, with burial to follow in White Lawn Cemetery near Saltillo.

Visitation will be Thursday 2 PM – 9 PM and Friday 10 AM until service. All visitation and funeral service will be at Saltillo United Methodist Church.

Pallbearers are: Darnell Lowery, Jim Brown, Patrick Collins, Casey Collins, Randy Inman and Richard Garrett. Honorary Pallbearers are: Roger Gant and Diego Porras.

Getting RIPped

I heard a (hip young) undertaker on Fresh Air today talking about cremation and embalming and death rituals and all that fun stuff, and it occurred to me that I am in my thirties and I have procreated and yet I still have not put on paper my wishes in the event of my untimely death, which is getting more and more statistically probable with every new day I draw breath. What am I waiting for? (Someone to do it for me.)

I suppose I can put a couple of throwaway paragraphs on the internet and then ask the twelve of you who still read this blog to feel free to email a link to all my loved ones should I die, to make sure what they understand of what I want squares with the crap I have actually thought about and written down. Is that how we do death prep in the Web 2.0 era? Oh god, we aren’t in the Web 2.0 era anymore are we? I should be tweeting out my living will in 150 parts and ending it with “LOL.” Also, I am just kidding. I know there are not even twelve of you left who read blogs, especially this one.

In all seriousness, I don’t want to be embalmed. What a waste of time and money and horrible chemicals that are causing everyone cancer, probably. I want to say, “put me in a wooden box and stick me in the ground wherever there is already a convenient hole and let me get all wormy as quickly as possible so maybe some flowers will grow above me, but DON’T put any pea gravel anywhere near me,” but I know it is more complicated than that. I’m not particularly sentimental about what happens to me after my death, because who cares, but I accept that it is a practical concern that the living will be left to deal with so maybe I can do them a solid and take out some of the guesswork.

First, give away all my organs. Or the ones still working, I guess. I won’t need any of them unless you think there is a decent, scientifically sound chance of reanimation, in which case PRESERVE EVERYTHING, INCLUDING MY BROWN FITZWELL BOOTS. My eyes are terrible but one of them has a weird spot in it that bestows magical powers, so don’t let that shit get buried. Give it to someone!

In all honesty, I am kind of charmed by the idea of donating my body to science and maybe being empirically useful for once in my life/death. Maybe hanging out on The Body Farm and getting nice and ripe in the sun for the clipboard-wielding students to study, and then eventually becoming a part of their collection of skeletons. Yes! It might be the closest I get to being in a Head Museum. Let me bookmark that application process right now, actually.

If that doesn’t work out, for whatever reason (no one can find a free truck to get me there?), just cremate me. Except let’s consider water/lye instead of fire. I don’t need a fancy or beautiful or comfortable coffin and I have no interest in an eternal resting place that’s just taking up space in the ground. Just pulverize (politely and efficiently) what’s left of me and take the bone “ashes” and mix me up with potting soil and plant something interesting with part of me. I will try not to spoil the new growth with my acidic wit.

If you think that I am joking in any way about all that stuff ^^ or about putting any or all of the following phrases (or those found in my previous post) in places meant to memorialize my life, let me reassure you: I am completely serious and, should there prove to be some kind of afterlife where I am not sentenced to hard, hot labor for all the schemin’ and cussin’ I did while among the living, I am going to DIE (AGAIN) LAUGHING when I see one of these phrases printed in my obit or on my (exquisitely designed) funeral program or on the cardboard box where my cremains rest. (Which reminds me, which one of my designer friends wants to take charge of the funeral program project? Come get this ridiculous Victorian-era decoupage source book from my office so you can be sure to really make the whole thing sing.)

Some more epitaph suggestions, should anyone choose to keep part of me in some kind of urn or manila envelope:

• Former indoor kid

• Quick to light, slow to burn

• Still silently judging you

• Hopeless romantic who never once believed in love

• Follow me @eyedeadcreative

• Once had her photo taken with Todd Zeile

• Incompatible with life

• Greatest hyperbolist of all time

The spider outside the front window

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There is a spider just outside the front window. She is suspended on a single thread, bisecting it between the points where it is attached to the pane. She’s halfway between her origin and her destination, dangling and swaying back and forth in the breeze. She’s dead. Kicked ye olde bucket while making a go at another web: her first, seventh, dozenth, hundreth — who really even knows but her. There is just the one thread she is suspended from, the beginnings of her new sticky hammock. So she had just gotten started.

She was setting up a new shop, spinning spinning spinning, driven by instinct. Something happened and she gave out, I guess. Seven of her little legs are curled up beneath her while one — the one she used to guide herself down the thread — sticks out behind her. A crooked little aerial ballet pose for the ages.

Noli timere

I love this:

His voice quavering, the son of Seamus Heaney has told mourners of his father’s final words, minutes before his death.

At a requiem mass in Dublin, crowded with mourners, Michael Heaney described how the poet and Nobel laureate, who died last week at the age of 74, had chosen Latin for the message to his wife, Marie. His last words were “in a text message he wrote to my mother just minutes before he passed away, in his beloved Latin and they read: ‘Noli timere’ – ‘don’t be afraid.'”

I love the message, I love that it sounds so beautiful in Latin, and I love that it came in a text message. RIP Mr. Heaney. I’ll do my best to heed your advice.

SHIT.

Bernie Mac’s passing is sad enough. But Isaac Hayes?

I was lucky enough to have Hayes as my commencement speaker when I graduated from college in 2004. Yes, he said “Hello, children” to us. The acoustics were shit so I had a hard time hearing a lot of the rest of his speech, even though I was in the front row. When it was time to do the deed, I walked across the stage, got my diploma, shook his hand, gazed up at him and heard him say “Best of luck” to me. Or something like that. I was starstruck and also in the thick of completing a major phase in my life so my memory of the exact moment is kind of … iffy. But still, its awesomeness sticks.

I’m going back to bed.