My friend Be the Boy started a meme on Twitter today – Say Thanks. It’s a simple premise – just thank each of your Twitter contacts for whatever it is they’ve brought to your life.

NovySan got me earlier today:

I haven’t thanked him yet. I’m not ungrateful, nor am I ungracious – I just can’t say all the things I want to say in only 140 characters.

Things like, Dear NovySan:

Thank you for helping me to be more me than I have ever been before.

Thank you for always having faith, instead of expectations.

Thank you for your spontaneous outbursts of joy, of rage, of unfettered and, above all, genuine emotion. Thank you for never hiding your feelings and, in that, for helping me to feel mine that much more deeply.

Thank you for teaching me that it’s okay to ask for help when I need it.

Thank you for pushing me past my boundaries, and providing a refuge when I’ve gone too far.

Thank you for reminding me that every experience is an adventure.

Thank you for loving my family, my friends, and my weird old broken-down cat.

And thank you, most of all, for not only loving me as much as I love you, but for allowing me to love you as much as you love me.

#saythanks

A few minutes ago, I saw a furry grey streak out of the corner of my eye. There was a rodent. On the kitchen table. I thought it was a rat, but the long, long tail was furry. Almost… fluffy, even.

NovySan jumped. I jumped. Our tiny visitor jumped. Off the table, onto the chest freezer, and from there onto the child gate we use to keep Schokie out of the living room. When it jumped, we saw the tiny “wings.”

It was a flying squirrel. In our kitchen.

It let me take some pictures, then we discussed our next move. I offered it a piece of freshly-baked banana-walnut cake (plus blueberries, minus the caramel, and with the walnuts mixed in). It seemed interested, but wary. I remembered the day a hummingbird stumbled into my study, and our former housemate John captured it with a towel. “That seems appropriate,” I thought, “given that it’s Towel Day.” I tried, but the towel slipped off, and our squirrel (soon to be christened Fidget) gave me such a dose of the big sad eyes that I didn’t dare try again. I picked up the banana cake, which I’d set on the floor, and held it up very near Fidget’s twitchy little nose. After a moment, he set a delicate black paw on the edge of the plate, and used his new leverage to launch himself into the darkness of the living room. I realized he was headed for the front door.

“Oh, good,” I said, and picked my way across the room to open the front door and screen, praying I wouldn’t step on him. I needn’t have worried. He’d scaled the WaterRower – the tallest object in the room. A moment later, he launched himself toward the front door, and I realized he’d seen his escape route.

“Oh, clever baby,” I said, just as he scrambled up the inside of the door and crawled through the little security window. I peeked at the outside of the door. Little Fidget was clinging to the outside of the door, considering his next move. I closed the window carefully, and then the door. When I opened it a moment later, I heard him scrambling through the jasmine on the front porch.

Goodnight, Fidget. And good luck.

***UPDATE*** NovySan’s friend Jen said Fidget’s not a squirrel – he’s a sugar glider. Which means he’s was definitely someone’s pet, and an illegal alien, too, since you’re not allowed to keep gliders in California.

Have you ever had to write one of the those blog posts that had to be written before you could write anything else, only it was so hard to write that you put off writing it for weeks and weeks and didn’t get anything else written, either? Yeah, this is one of those posts.

On April 16, near the end of the work day, NovySan told me that Frank A. Lauro was dead. Frank was Novy’s best friend in high school. They drifted apart in college, as friends sometimes do, but they’d been back in touch recently. The words didn’t make sense to me – less sense, even, than John’s call to tell me that Shawn was dead.

At Frank’s wake, on the 21st, a lot of people got up to tell stories. Frank’s family… his friends… his coworkers… And when NovySan got up to tell his stories (and out himself as the person one of Frank’s favorite stories was about), he said that Frank, more than anything, was a storyteller, and he asked everyone to keep their stories about Frank alive. Tell them to other people. Pass them around. Make sure that Frank isn’t forgotten.

I don’t have a lot of Frank stories. I only met him a few times – I doubt I spent a total of 10 hours in his presence. But he was a part of NovySan, and that makes him a part of me. I thought of him as a friend, and I always thought there’d be time enough to know him.

If Shawn’s death taught me anything, it should have been that there’s never enough time.

On the 17th, though, as NovySan was finalizing plans for our trip to Chicago for Frank’s wake, and I was sitting at this very table, trying to wrap up as much work as I could before we went, staring at a computer screen blurred through the tears (just as it is now), I did what I do when I feel frustrated and helpless – I went chasing stories.

There are a lot of stories about Frank online. The first one I found, courtesy of Comic Book Resources, might have been the most important. Several years ago, another member of a comic book forum to which Frank belonged died suddenly (and, like Frank, far too young). Frank, who lived near the funeral home, offered to take the board’s condolences to the family. Afterward, he submitted a full report. I won’t quote from it here, because the situation led to Frank being banned from the board in question (and I really have no desire to involve myself in whatever politics led to that decision), but if you follow the links, you’ll get a good sense not only of the controversy, but also of who Frank was.

That article at Comic Book Resources also led me to Imwan, which was Frank joined on Christmas Day 2006, and which became his undisputed online home. Imwan is where I found not only stories about Frank, but also stories by Frank. In The Writers’ Block, I found a story he’d written in grad school. I’d known Frank was a writer, but it was the first time I’d been able read something he’d written. And it’s good. It’s damned good. The formatting is important, as Frank noted. “It works perfectly in Word,” he said. It works perfectly in OpenOffice Writer, too – and I hope his family doesn’t mind, but I’ve uploaded a PDF version to prove it.

It’s been more than a month, and it still doesn’t make sense to me that Frank is dead. I’m grateful, though, that so much of him still lives online. His last post on Imwan, dated April 13, was a single word – Graphology. As last words go, that one’s not bad.