For Bev

I almost forgot one of my favorites, a picture of the quintessential Tara — at least when she’s mellow and not stalking whatever prey or toy or window screen is available to do her destructo-cat number on.

This is from two weeks ago when she still had a little kitten fluff —

There’s something about the trust it takes to expose one’s soft underbelly that I admire and love, not just in a cat or dog, but in a person too. That’s why this post is for Bev. We all have a sunny side that we share with people, but sometimes we don’t even realize there are shadows in others’ lives, perhaps not the same shadows we have in our lives, but shadows all the same, and on some level universal. Life is not always sunny and bright, and we don’t always smile, nor should we. Sometimes our shadows need to be shared.

My friend Beverly Jackson recently went through the process of learning where the father she never knew except in shadowy childhood memories was shot down in France, during World War II. She sold chapbooks of her poetry to help pay for a trip to his burial site in France, and the place where his plane went down.

Her story made me realize how lucky I am to know my dad, for one thing. For another it illustrated how kind people can be toward absolute strangers. The people in that small town in France received Bev with open arms. Then Bev graced us all, in choosing to share her personal and emotional experience with even more people, on her blog and in a newspaper account.

I’m grateful for that, because there are some stories meant to be shared, stories we can all benefit from hearing or reading, stories that touch us in places we don’t often think about, stories that make us appreciate life and death in new ways. If you have the chance, I recommend following Bev’s blog journey to France to find her father. The entire photo journal can be found here.