It was nice and cool when I awoke today so I decided to take advantage of it by taking a long walk at first light. The brutal heat of another Indiana summer is just around the corner. Technically the season is just getting underway though by my reckoning it’s almost half over. I count summer as beginning on Memorial Day and wrapping up on Labor Day which means the 4th of July is the midpoint. And that’s just a week away. Allow me my silly delusions, I hate hot weather.

Our neighborhood is right on miles of paved walking trails which is like my own private path to a wooded paradise. The small town of Yorktown, Indiana is surrounded by an oasis of corn fields. The crop is coming along nicely and will certainly be at least knee high by the 4th of July, though it doesn’t seem quite as tall as normal. That could be related to the cooler weather I’ve been enjoying though there’s barbershop chatter about the high-cost of fertilizer causing some farmers to use less than normal amounts…

I’m writing today’s post while sitting in a Starbucks in nearby Daleville, Indiana. Getting here was a lovely drive through the countryside with the windows rolled down. I came here to work on a different post for another friend who recently became a Silent Key. He actually died a few months ago though I only learned of his passing this week. Damn it, I’m sick of mentioning these passings, but I’m compelled to write something, and as hams are passing in large numbers, I’m certain it won’t be the last.

“My generation is on the way out, and each death I have felt as an abruption, a tearing away of part of myself. There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate — the genetic and neural fate — of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.”

We will go out for dinner tonight. The living keep moving while the dead stop. I’ve often likened this to the moving walkway at the airport. People step on it heading to some destination and every now and then someone gets where they were going and step off. Those still moving along the walkway can only look back at those who recently stepped off and remember. Life goes on. Until it doesn’t.