Personal Journal

How Fragile We Are (sting lyric)

Yeah, the hockey season, for me, kicks off tonight with my beloved Canucks against Calgary. Should be a kick-ass game.
Been spinning around at ESPN, getting psyched, and there’s the Dan Snyder story. Dead at 25, smacking into a wall at 80 miles per hour in a car driven by Dan Heatley, the most talanted 22 year old in the game two Sundays ago. Tragedy sucks. But why do I find it so beautiful, too, feeling in that terrible moment utterly severed from human reach, the notion that we are spiritually naked before our god.
Such is Dan Heatley’s moment. Mistake, innocent or not (no alcohol was involved), that leaves a man dead.

Dan Snyder was never drafted. He worked his way into the league on blood, sweat, and tears, and he had 13 goals last year on a poor team. I’ll try not to forget him. Atlanta Thrashers center, the kind of kid you’d want your own kid to be. A simple kind of man, whose talent was on the cusp, but whose will pushed him over into the right side of the line.

It’s a shame.
Anyone remember the name Brittany Cecil?
She was the 14 year old girl who went to a Columbus Blue Jackets game for her birthday, and a stray puck hit her in the head, causing a whiplash effect that tore an artery in the back of her skull. That tear produced a clot, which resulted in her death.

Sports Illustrated ran an issue covering the death of Brittany Cecil. I bought it. I put it in my old army foot locker where I keep all the precious memories that I feel obliged to tell no one about. The East German money those young men gave me on the border. The shrapnel from the Gulf War. The photographs that a girlfriend took of me in front of a Caravaggio painting. Things that from time to time I need to revisit, to remember, god has given me a life that I am supposed to bond with, to take things from that no one else can ever experience, understand, and sometimes even fathom. Most of them are bittersweet memories, things that remind me of the frailty of existence, of the delicate treasure that is life, and how easy it is to find yourself on the wrong side of that line Dan Snyder strode upon – to falter, to fail, and to recover from, and to struggle again to take those meager talents and push yourself over that line and be redeemed. To measure up to something, like Dan Snyder, whatever that measure may be,.

Valle con Dios


It is never too late to be what you might have been. -- George Eliot
Courage to start and willingness to keep everlasting at it are the requisites for success. -- Alonzo Newton Benn