fifty

(Andrée here.)
That's Sean and Erik as tykes up there, Erik being the blond on the right.  Did you know his hair had ever been that color?  As he grew up it settled more toward the darker color most of you knew best.
He would have been fifty today.  There would have been some grey in there.  Runs in the family.

I wish E had had the time to come up with a few more grey hairs, but often I wonder if perhaps there was something so big waiting for him that he couldn't stay.  I found this in "Song of Myself" by Walt Whitman:

I am an acme of things accomplish'd, and I an encloser of things to be.
My feet strike an apex of the apices of the stairs,
On every step bunches of ages, and larger bunches between the steps,
All below duly travel'd, and still I mount and mount.

***

Happy birthday, brother.

Someday I'll get past the first stair.