The sliding glass door

I'll venture away from a sports story today.

The following is entitled: The Sliding Glass Door

I'm at the age when I'm losing a lot of my friends. All of us will go through it. Each time it happens, I sit back for a moment and recall those moments in time, those flashbacks, if you will, like when I walked down the hallway in high school with that special friend, or later in life, sat in the dugout and had a brief conversation with a teammate, or, more times than not, shuffled through the morning paper and discovered I lost another friend.

Like most people, I thank my lucky stars that I'm still here, still around to savor those "special moments" with my friends...and my loved ones,  who are still with us.

Four or five days a week, I push a button and wait patiently for a caregiver to open up a sliding glass door, allowing me to enter the memory care unit of which my mother is a resident. I take a deep breath and enter a world where all the residents have a hard time remembering those special moments in their life.

I thank my lucky stars my mother is still with us and still utters my name as I sit down beside her.  We still have our conversations -- although they are brief at times. I walked the hallway the other day, while my mother was being attended to by a "caring" caregiver. There are close to 40 residents at the center and each one of them has a square wooded cabinet, hanging on the wall just outside their door. Inside the cabinet, are pictures and keepsakes, noting the resident's "special moments" in their life. Some are photos from the 1950s. 1940s, 1930s and even the 1920s.

Every time I prepare to leave the facility, I wait for a caregiver to hustle over and unlock the sliding glass door. I walk into the sunlight and look up at the blue sky. I take a deep breath and thank my lucky stars that I can go on and create some more special moments in my life.

I will be back tomorrow and I will  patiently wait for the sliding glass door to open. You can count on it.