The bottom photo is Uncle Lloyd, Aunt Jean, Cousin Doug, Uncle Robert, me, Aunt Doris and a neighbor. We are all standing on top of Robert's hill on the South edge of town, with the grain elevator and the Missouri River behind us.
Seven people in the top photo, and every one of them is gone. Seven people in the bottom photo, and every one of them is gone except me. "Just for a moment we're all together; just for a moment we're happy," says Emily when she spends a portion of a day from her previous life, Thornton Wilder, OUR TOWN.
In high school, when it rarely rained but did and we were in PE and could not play out of doors, we were hustled into the gym to participate in a brutal game of dodgeball. My friend Richard Meyers would stand perfectly still and quickly take the hit so he could move to the sidelines right away and no longer have to participate in the "game". I was like most of the others, trying so hard to keep out of the path of the flying ball (that actually did not hurt too much when it struck you). But when the other side had the ball and one particular guy got control of the ball and was ready to hurl it hard, the opposition would scatter as much as possible so as not to be hit. I'm not so sure that the last one standing meant much in that game, but nobody but Richard seemed to want to get hit too early or at all.
But I look at these pictures of the family and lament that every one depicted is dead. They slept and awakened so many times over the course of those lives that were significant to them and the rest of us, and one day they no longer did. Eventually no one survives. But you keep trying to dodge the ball and survive for yet another day on this planet even though most days are unimportant, so unimportant that no one takes a picture to commemorate that particular event.
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