Another Leak at Grandpa's

Sunday Mark and I visited my Grandpa Mike. He’s a main player in my book. The closet door was open and the closet was empty and stuff was about. Mark asked, “Is your roof leaking again?”

Even though Grandpa had a new roof put on this past summer, it was leaking again. He had taken everything out of the closet so that it wouldn’t be damaged. There were old newspaper clippings and whole sections even that Grandma Ann had saved for some reason or other. The front of one section from 1984 showed my brothers and me as we road in the Franklin Fourth of July parade.
For those of you who haven’t yet read My Lost Summer, I’ll fill you in: my coma was the result of a horseback riding accident while I was riding my horse from Carlisle, a village where I grew up, to Franklin, the next town over, to be in the Fourth of July parade. The year was 1983, and I was 13. I didn’t make it to the parade.

Small towns being small, of course by the end of the summer, everyone knew what had happened since the local papers carried updates regularly.

In 1984 the parade committee asked me to be the Grand Marshall because of what had happened the year before. I was truly honored to have been asked. I felt like the belle of the ball until the driver put the top of the convertible up because of rain.

In this picture, the one from the Chronicle salvaged from Grandpa’s closet, my body language indicates that I’m breathing in the last bit of celebrity. I remember a photographer shouting my name from the sidewalk just before this shot was taken. I gave him a big, $10 smile, knowing the picture was for the paper because of the fancy camera, and I rode the rest of the parade route in the relative shelter of the convertible, satisfied with my showing, however regretful that the rain hadn’t held off longer.