Shaw Avenue 11/16/16

This was originally published on my Tumblr blog, which I’ve been slowly moving over. The picture was taken on 4/23/16 during a family walk to get us out of the house. My siblings and I are standing with our childhood home in the background. Denny, Dawan, Me, & Denise

The holidays are quickly approaching and I want to run in the other direction. Back to April. Back to last November. I am just so unprepared for holidays without him. At the same time I am really looking forward to January because that will mean the holidays are over.

I really don’t spend my days crying. I promise. And most of the time I am okay but it really doesn’t take much for the thoughts and pictures to start scrolling through my mind. If I go anywhere during the day I inevitably end up driving or crossing Shaw. I can’t really avoid it.

It’s crazy how much of our life is tied to Shaw. We both worked on Shaw. One of my elementary schools is on Shaw. We met a few blocks from Shaw. We opened our first checking account on Shaw. Fresno State is on Shaw. I spent four years of my childhood in the big house on the corner of Shaw and DeWolf. And he died on Shaw, a half mile away from that house. I have now driven down that section of Shaw 3 or 4 times. I only go there when I really need to let it all out and I don’t have to do that very often.

Ironically some of my best and a few of my worst childhood memories are from that house on Shaw. We moved from a tiny 3 bedroom house to that house and I think we all thought we were rich! A lot of the time we had our own bedrooms and somehow the 6 of us survived with 1 bathroom. I don’t even know how that was possible! We had all kinds of animals including a horse, a steer, goats, rabbits, ducks, geese, dogs, cats and pigs. There was always something to do. One time the pig had 13 piglets. They were cute when they were little. I remember one day I sat in the pasture and played with them. Later that day I was on the porch when they decided to go for a walk. Across Shaw. As I watched a car sped through their pack. All you could hear were squeals of pain. I ran in the house screaming. I was so upset I couldn’t really articulate what had happened and my parents thought one of the other kids had been hit. Miraculously only a few died. One had a broken leg but my mom had a splint put on it and it recovered just fine. We laugh at that story.

Another time I was getting home from school on the bus after track practice. There was an almond orchard surrounding two sides of our property. I saw Denise and Denny jogging along the orchard and, a little further, I saw that someone had left a few piles of clothes in the orchard. The bus stopped across the street from my house and the bus driver got out and let me cross the street. Suddenly, I saw a strange man with my brother and sister. He looked kind of crazy and seemed to have his arms on Denny. He asked me to get my parents and told me he had hit two men. We later found out that the tragedy began when a girl was driving by our house, pulling a horse trailer, and hit our Saint Bernard, Morley. Since she had the horse trailer she didn’t want to stop so she went home and told her dad and uncle. They lived less than a quarter mile away, on the opposite side of Shaw. Her dad and uncle drove over to tell us. For some reason they decided to park across Shaw instead of pulling into our driveway. I think the sun was low in the sky as they crossed. The driver never saw them. They were thrown into the orchard and killed instantly. I didn’t realize that I had seen them. Our dog was injured and my parents had him put down. What an awful day! This was forty years ago and I still remember almost everything about it.

How ironic that Patrick would ride past that house and a little way down the road his life would also end tragically. I didn’t really think about the fact that people lived near the accident site and would now be forever tied to this tragedy like I am to the one forty years earlier.

Today Camille went to Subs and Grubs for lunch. She used her phone to call in the order for herself and 3 others. As they went up to pay, the owner asked which one was Camille. She told her she recognized the name from caller ID. She pulled her aside and told her she lived out on Shaw and had been praying for my family. She didn’t charge Camille for her lunch. Such a small, crazy world! What a nice and unexpected gesture! I continue to feel the love that surrounds us, some of it from people we don’t even know. This is such a horrific experience but we are very blessed that so many people care about us and continue to do anything they can think of to help us. I know that I will survive the holidays. I will be surrounded by family and we will keep moving forward. There’s really no other way to go.