The Morgue

Not my refrigerator

The above picture is not of my refrigerator door. That is obvious because I have no kids that draw pictures. However I take them and years ago found these plastic frames with magnets on the back so that I could post photographs of friends and fond memories on the refrigerator. Some of the pictures are very old. As are some of the magnets I have collected.

Among the magnets is: Denial is a God-Given Survival Skill. And: I want a young man with old money. The latter is old enough I am willing to consider an old man with young money provided there is nobody else in his will.

Then there are all the self-help magnets: Angel Fire Automotive, Timberlake Snow Removal, Colfax County emergency services and offices, Preventing Forest Fires, Fish and Game (or bears and cougars). And the not so helpful ones like Kit Carson Telecom, and Lovelace health clinic. I don't use either of those except to hold up a print out of The Four Agreements.

Among the pictures are those of my youth showing me and friends at weights we will never again see, and a collection of photos from Christmas Cards I received from friends picturing themselves and looking far older than I remember. And for of the people for ever entombed in plastic on my refrigerator wall are now dead. That number was a rather shocking realization this morning as I put the picture of Marc back up there. I had taken it down to scan for the obit the newspaper ran. Others are:

Ross Ward standing by my friend Carla on their Christmas missive of the previous year: Ross may have been the first to leave my company of friends. He got early onset Alzheimers and died within three years of being put in a care facility due to his violent behavior as he slid down the slippery slope.

Jim Elliot: He was second. His significant other whom I never met wrote me a wonderful letter and enclosed it with a Christmas Card he had already prepared but not sent. I think that singular experience put me off the tradition of sending cards at the holidays. The picture I took when he visited me in New Mexico the year before. I saw death in his eyes then. He was my physic friend and spiritual adviser for many years and I have never thought he was very far away even now.

Kathi Densow Arnold with her husband Dirk: Marc and I frequently "doubled" on adventures with Dirk and Kathi and on that particular day we had had our pictures taken on a top of the mountain hike. Kathi and I were both Gemini's and celebrated our birthdays every year together at some point between June 3 and 10. She left before her last birthday a year ago this past April.
Newspapers have a morgue. They used to be in the basement but probably are now scanned into some computer storage system. It was where all the past copies of the newspaper were kept and files on prominent people just in case they were needed for a speedy obit.
 It dawned on me this morning that my refrigerator is a bit of a morgue in the newspaper sense. It chronicles my past life and the past lives of my friends captured forever in kodachrome. It pays homage to those ideas which I thought were once so important they had to be enshrined or at least put where I could see them daily. The question is whether once something goes up on the refrigerator should you ever take it off?