A nice sunny blue-skied day, today, ..where I live. I have a soar throat.

On campus outside the library there is a new pile of sand. It wasn’t there Friday. The sand reminds me of sand that I remembered, because I would have to remember it if I was reminded of it, …from a very long time ago.

For some reason dad decided that it would be nice if me and Jason and Corey and Collin had some sort of sand-holding perimeter at the house. A sand box. The pile of sand outside the Henderson library is exactly the same kind of sand. Not ocean beach sand, but the kind of sand that had larger particles of dirt and rocks, um, in it. Gravel plant sand. Ten dollars per truckload sand.

He built a wooden perimeter up the hill, out in the yard, and dumped the sand in. We played in it. A lot. Then we got older and played in it less. There was a large hickory tree right beside it, and when we weren’t out there constantly disturbing the sand, in the springtime some of the buried hickory nuts would sprout up and grow to the surface. Usually we found the sprouts and pulled them out while digging in the sand for no apparent reason, as kids do with such sand.

The cats thought that the sand was a giant kitty litter box. We played in a sand box that was littered with Special Kitty, except this Special Kitty had already passed through the digestional tracts of one of three or four cats.

Then of course we got a little older, grew out of playing in the sand, and grew in to …digging holes, for no apparent reason than just to dig. The sandbox turned into a continuous location for deep excavation projects and misplaced shovels. On numerous occasions the four of us were sternly warned about the consequences of leaving un-manned shovels and pick axes to lie out in the rain. Such tools belonged in sheds, where they would not rust. Digging just for the heck of it was fun. At the time. At the time.

Once we were all standing around the old sand box and decided that we would dig as deep as could possibly be dug. Perhaps to China.

The digging got extremely difficult around four feet down, some kind of especially hard Arkansas clay that needed dynamite. So the project was stalled until further notice. It was like one of those big open pit copper mines.

This one was on a “kids with shovels” scale, but it felt the same.

Our hole was abandoned on several occasions, sometimes due to labor disagreements and quite often due to slowdowns resulting from accidental injury. Environmental concerns played a role as well. The hole was filled to the brim with water from heavy flooding. Authorities heavily discouraged the practice of leaving expensive mining tools at the bottom of the water-filled pit, and extraction of dirt from the old-sand-box facility would completely cease around 1989.

An old tin canoe usually sat approximately 20 feet down the hill from our big grave-sized hole, and the hickory tree provided ample ammunition for many a war. After gathering enough buckets full of hickory nuts, two of us would bunker down in the deep hole and the other two would get behind the canoe. I think I can throw so well, even today, because we spent so much time throwing hickory nuts at each other from behind the canoe and down in the hole.

The giant hole entered a long phase of inactivity when we got older. We sometimes would chance to walk by it and think, “wow, I can’t believe we dug a hole so incredibly deep and useless.” Digging for fun isn’t something that stays with you.

Then there was the week when two of our beloved tick-infested family dogs were killed by the neighbors evil-eyed Blue Healer. That dog was ferocious. Our dogs, Skipper and some other stupid cocker spaniel, lay dead or dying at the hands of ferocious neighbor dog. Dad laid in weight for the evil dog, and shot it. This story relates to our “giant hole where the sandbox used to be,” because all three dogs were thrown into the deep pit, and the four of us spent the afternoon shoveling the excavated dirt on top of the two massacred dogs and the shot-dead ferocious dog. It was kind’ of like our own little Nazi Germany, except in Arkansas, and with dogs. Never speak of this again.

Driving home tonight, that Traveling Soldier Dixie Chicks song came on the radio, like it has been 284 times per day over the last week or so. I heard it for the first time back in the summer, from a live concert recording that a local Little Rock station played on the air. I bet the song means a whole lot more though, to a person who actually lost somebody in Vietnam.

It carries a weird kind of significance with me too, though. Aunt Carol gave me a twenty dollar bill one afternoon, back in August, when Collin was in the hospital bed and we were on the hospital couches. It was for cafeteria food, or whatever else I needed, because we had already spent a week and half living out of a hospital waiting room and were living like hermits and homeless, or something in between. Everybody was giving me money.

But I took that particular twenty dollars and spent it on a Dixie Chicks cd at Barns & Noble. Me Corey and Leslie had gone out for a couple of hours, in between visitation times. We wanted to get out of the hospital for awhile, and dad wanted us to buy him one of those appointment scheduling calendar things. Dad likes to plan. I think some people like to write down and plan everything they do, just because it gives them some sense of control over their unpredictable often depressing lives. But dad isn’t like that, ..he’s just organized; something I should pick up on.

So we went to Barns & Noble to pick him out of the appointment books. I noticed the cd, and bought it, because I’d heard it was something approaching good. It was.

We struck out from the hospital on several occasions, because all in all we lived there for exactly two weeks before my brother died. Generally those excursions were for essentials like toiletries and stuff to keep us busy; magazines that we could bring back and pretend to be occupied in reading.

I remember breaking down and crying in the mens underwear isle of Wal-Mart. I remember making a special trip to K Mart to buy Collin some Ensure, for the short time he was eating and cognizant enough to whisper to us. I remember going driving down to college for half a day to enroll and pay for classes that had already started, seeing Dr Simmons about letting me enroll in “Concepts & Layout”; and going to my Magazine and Newspaper Feature Writing class. The doctors had told us that we should consider getting back to some form of normal life, because it might take months and months for Collin to get better.

Driving back to Little Rock that day after tying up lose ends at school that I really could’ve cared less about at the time, driving back to hospital, I felt like such a dick.

I feel guilty about that now. Collin died the night I got back. Me and Corey went to see him at eight, then at ten. We told him that we were camped out in the parking lot in a camper that Doug had brought, that we were going to have parties out on the lawn by the street; we were going to grill and camp out till he got better. We hit the metal button to open the door, walked out of the CVICU and that was it. That was it.