Tonight's picture was taken in April of 2005. This was a classic Mattie photo! It captured all the activity around him and us. Mattie LOVED trains and designing train tracks. He would inter-mix train sets together -- electrical with his wooden Thomas trains. But also notice his battery powered car parked under our dining room break front. We were always surrounded by vehicles and things with wheels! Not to mention Mattie's sippy cup of milk. Our running joke was Mattie was going to have the strongest bones around from the amount of milk he drank. It did not work out that way..... since he developed bone cancer.
Quote of the day: Memory breeds in me strange loneliness. ~ William Herbert Carruth
After a long day today, I sat down at the computer to put a blog together. Yet as I was writing, I decided to open the window to let in the spring like breezes. As I did this, I could hear something VERY familiar to me in our commons area. What was it? A child playing with a remote controlled car. I remember those days SO WELL! Mattie loved all his remote controlled vehicles. He got his first one as a birthday present literally when he was one year old! A friend of mine gave him this gift and I honestly thought Mattie was too young for it. Yet, guess what? Mattie gravitated to it like a duck to water. He played with it for years until it stopped working and then got his next remote control car.
Tonight as I could hear that sound through my window, it just brought me back in time. Mattie even had remote controlled cars in the hospital. They would go zooming up and down the hallways and in the late hours, because Mattie rarely slept, he would put rubber bugs on a car and send it to visit his nurses (at the nurses station). They were all good sports about it, and typically would then come visit Mattie in his room to socialize. In the beginning of treatment Mattie loved to socialize, but as the impact of treatment wore down on him, Mattie always opted for isolation. Amazing how a slight sound outside tonight could capture my attention and transport me back in years.
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