Still alive, dammit!

I remember my brother being born. Dad took my sister and I to the hospital and we waved to my mother who was high up in the windows of a large red brick building. He came home and everyone kept telling us he would die before he was three years old. Maybe sooner.

But he learned to get around, not crawling like other babies, but scooting around on his bottom using his legs to pull himself along. Instead of wearing the knees out of his rompers, he wore the seats out!

It was just the beginning of a long life where he would always march to a different drummer.

Brilliant, but with a sense of right, wrong and interesting that fell way outside the box, he could be found sleeping in the sunshine of someone's driveway as a child, or picking up stray birds, possums and bones on his walks through nature.

He would give you his last dime, do the work of ten men, and was always there when I needed him, but he couldn't stop drinking until a few years ago and never managed to quit smoking. So many heart attacks later, minus two toes and with two more ready to be amputated, he found his kidneys shutting down and had some kind of gastrointestinal bleed that finally did him in.

Run into him, or talk to him on the phone and his first words were always, "Still alive, dammit!"

Well, he is no longer here.

I imagine him soaring high above the earth like the bald eagles he loved so much. Free of pain and earthly problems, ready to be part of the light at last.