Assignment number two...a picture is worth more than a blank page. Take out those dusty photo albums. Pick out photo #14. Count however you like but make sure you stop at photo number 14. Look at the photo for 2-3 minutes. Then for ten minutes, write down all the feelings that the photo made you feel. Don't censor yourself. Just write.

The rules didn't say I had to start at the beginning. So I started at the beginning of a section and counted from there. Maybe starting at the beginning would have been easier, how many feelings would a picture of a duck have stirred up? But no. I had to pick my 22nd birthday and the 14th picture is Sean at the keyboard. This is hard. Feelings abound.

Sean Platon Curry

When I close my eyes and bring up Sean Curry in my mind he is always sitting at the keyboard. Always playing the piano. Often I hear the music. This night, the day after my 22nd birthday, was one of the last times we were happy.

The buzzed hair suits him. But the scar snaking its way above his left ear is the harbinger of things to come. The scar, a meandering reminder of the surgery that stole him from me, makes me angry. I didn't want him to have the surgery. I was afraid of losing him. I knew the risk. But I couldn't deny him the chance to be "normal" so I didn't even try to talk him out of it. I regret that decision to this day.

Then Sean I knew never came home from the hospital. A shadow came home in his place. He came home with a railroad of staples snaking across his skull and having traded his petit mal seizures, not for the normalcy he was promised but rather for grand mal seizures and the total loss of his short term memory. The focus of my anger shifted to the doctors. I was heartbroken for him.

But on this night we were still happy. We were still celebrating my birthday. Seeing his apartment again makes me smile. The Palm frond wallpaper was truly awful. I can almost smell the scent of cigarettes and stale beer overlaid with incense. He's at the electric keyboard. It's resting on the utility spool directly under the "chandelier". To call it a chandelier was a kind lie. He'd crafted from a bicycle tire frame, two empty Bud quarts, an empty fifth of Stoli, an empty bottle of Ouzo and about a dozen discarded Pepsi cans.

He's playing. He's playing "China Grove". Don't ask me how I remember that, but I do. Though he's the only one in the picture I know that Dave is on bass and I'm playing tenor sax. Other pictures on the page tell the rest of the story. Music filled the apartment, spilling out the open front door and drawing folks from all over the complex. We jammed into the wee hours of the morning. It was one of the five best birthdays of my life.

Can it really have been 14 years ago? How is the loss still so fresh? The pain still so great? About a year after this photo was made his brother came and took him away. I never saw him again. All searches have come up empty. Is he dead? Is he alive? Did he recover ANY of the things his grasp for "normal" cost him? So many unanswered questions. As always these pictures are bittersweet. I miss him so badly.