Pomp up the jam (and let the lights shine on)

The shrine to my youngest brother is filled with track medals, running shoes and pieces of his artwork. The color scheme is decidedly blue, though he's not exactly upset about leaving Longmont for the plains that roll in Seward, Nebraska.
A few short months, and Adam will be headed for Concordia University. He'll be getting paid to run track, and pursue his art. He wants to be a graphic designer. He wants to rake in cash like blades of grass after mowing's done.
My bet is, he'll do it.
Adam is graduating from high school on Saturday, and Friday is his graduation party, that rite of passage when many you know (or don't) and love (or don't again - that's up to you) come to eat your food, tread on your lawn and congratulate you on a job well done. Of course, it's all in good fun, and no one is upset about the food, because it's there for everyone, and the company is pleasant, and people mingle as the dusk gathers, and then they go home and the night settles in and that chapter of your life is ended.
Just think of all the dusting you did, all for that one chapter of your life. But this is how history operates, and the dusting wasn't bad, and the food was really quite good, and it was wonderful to see everyone again, and how the world is spinning, and it is getting late, and we should all really go to bed and wake up to live again tomorrow and repeat the process.
Graduations are snapshots of pleasant moments in our lives when we breathe and cherish the bounty of being alive. They are an organized chaos in a larger dance.
We cannot predict how that dance will end, and how the dance began can only be half-remembered.
Here in the present, though, we are called to glow and thrive, if only momentarily. We have lived another day, and we are stronger for it.
As we go to sleep, the remainder of the world is waking up. It is a cycle that inevitably repeats itself. If you did not like today's cycle, rest your eyes; you may enjoy the next.
Strands of day link strains of night, and sunlight falls to the moon. And if nothing else links us - though it is preposterous to think that nothing else links us - there is always the light that shines upon the ones we love.
No matter how far apart we will find ourselves, we can rest assured that light forges a bond in our hearts and in our minds. At times, we may find ourselves wandering like terrestrial balloons linked to a common orb in space.
But there is a hope that has withstood time itself, and I wish to leave it with you now:
Reunions are, thankfully, inevitable, if only in the mind.

This Buddy of mine...

In case you're wondering, I'm not yet in Detroit. Instead, I'm back home in Longmont, Colo., for roughly three-and-a-half weeks, shooting the breeze with the fam and eating hamburger sandwiches.

On Wednesday, I was in the backyard playing fetch with Buddy, our Boston terrier. Buddy is a feisty, smoosh-nosed energy hound. He'd put a greyhound to shame in a race, but he's also rather short, meaning he stops well shy of where the stick lands in the grass because he can't see it. I had to walk to the stick, pick it up and wave it in his face to regain his attention before throwing the stick over his head again. If you're lucky, Buddy will find the stick and return it to you.

He just won't let you have it. Try to pull it from his pudgy jowls, and he'll burble like an angry Jawa. Try to extend the stick above your head, and he'll jump like he were born bouncing on a trampoline.

Buddy is as nimble as a goat and oftentimes as ornery. He can jump from floor to footstool to couch in the blink of an eye. He will turn and attack you in a moment and, in the next, snuggle beside you beneath the covers on your bed. He is an angel and a demon, the fleshly extension of the yin-yang coloring fixed, by nature, in his coarse hair.

But I digress. Buddy is a dog, and a faithful one at that. Just don't bug him after 10 p.m. He gets angry when he's awoken.