Nikki Valentine

Most people's dark sides are pretty pathetic.  The evil that people imagine is sometimes great, but everyone imagines an open season on loud people or people who stop and block aisles in warehouse stores.  Few actually do it.  Then those who do are sometimes shocking in their...patheticness.  If that's a word.  More often than not the people who kill are whiners, needy and entitled.  Not getting what they want is a great injustice and they will do anything, without regard for others, to fulfill a desire.

This hit me in terms of tragedy today.  I was asked some weeks ago if I had ever loved someone so much that it made me cry.  I answered, without really thinking, that I had forgotten how to cry long before I learned how to love.  It probably sounds like a 'tough guy pretending to be deep' platitude. Sorry.

I remember the last time I cried and why.  Things today brought that memory very close to the surface.  Mirrored it too well.  So the memory was there and I poked at it... and it wasn't so huge a tragedy.  Remove the fact of living it and it is a very small story.  It wasn't "Where the Red Fern Grows" by any means, or "Brian's Song".  But, really, written with less skill would "Where the Red Fern Grows" have been what it is?  The story is small- a boy and a dream and his dogs and love and loyalty to the edge of death.  A small story, except to the boy, and to all the people who became that boy for a few hours while reading that book.

Goodbye, old girl.  I'm glad you had one last good spring.