Walk the world for me...

I re-read "Eric" by Doris Lund again, in preparation for my writing my aunt's memoirs.

Eric was one of those books that I never forgot. It was required High School reading for most American's, so it was included in one of Reader's Digest condensed books.

My aunt had a copy that my dad inherited, and the summer of 1993 was the year I read a lot of books.

I'd just discovered writing and was teetering between young adult books like Sweet Dreams and Sweet Valley High and the all the other books found through the rest of my house. I read everything that I could get my hands on that summer. I spent my days rollerblading with my cousin and the nights just reading and writing.

I was 12 when I got my hands on "Eric". It was the first condense book story i'd ever read. Doris Lund was such an amazing writer that I felt like I was there with them, desprately hoping with her family that Eric be cured of his illness.

Re-reading it now, more than ten years later, gave me a greater understanding and a broader perspective to what the characters are going through.

It's obsessive, but i'd cast Eric as Robbie McNeill in my head, since he was blonde, 6'2, great with kids, and interested in athletics.

That I was doing it for research de-sensitized me for the best of three hours. When I was 12, I was a basket case through most of the pages. I'm amazed that there aren't any watermarks as proof.

Now, having a sick relative dying of cancer and a picture in my head, I was simply amazed that I held up.

Not a day goes by that I'm not reminded that all this could be gone. Whenever I close my eyes at night, I know that there is a possibility that I may not be able to open them tomorrow. When I walk home, I know there is a chance that I may never get home. Crossing the street, I'm always aware how easy it is to get hit.

I told my dentist of an exercise once: Press your face to the mirror, then slowly retreat back. Then look at your world. Stop for a moment and think--that is a chair, that is a table, that's the sky and this is your hand. Don't think beyond anything but what you see, don't make any associations. Someone made all this possible, it isn't you, me, or any one we know in this earth. It exists, it is matter, and we don't know how.

But someone does, and he can take it all away again.

I think I scared him, but he asked if he could call me anyway. He was young, cute and impressionable. But after saying that, all I could think of was "heck, he dies too."

We all do.

In the book, Eric said something about him not really minding that he'd died at 22. He was sad to leave the people he loved, but he expressed that in a way, this was better than punching the clock for fifty years until he got his gold watch. That he'd done and seen so much at his young age than some people had at 50 or 60.

Sometime near the end, he'd asked his mother to walk the world for him. To see things that he no longer had the strength to see.

I already feel like i'm on borrowed time, but tomorrow I guess I'll be seeing things through my aunts eyes. And every time I look at something, i'll ask myself "will this be the last time?"

And just for a minute, just for her, i'll say "Nope. I have all the time in the world."