The New Road

Jay Kurtz

I've been thinking a lot about Jay Kurtz recently. It's probably because I was around the Fremont Hub a lot recently and that place has a vivid memory for me. We had just bought the house and Lori was in Florida with her Mother. Jay had come over to help with some home stuff and we decided to go to a movie. Problem was that I didn't know where anything was at that time. We went to Newark Java and got a coffee and read the paper to find a movie time.

We decided on The Game which was playing at the Fremont Hub on some street called 'Mowry'. We only had about twenty minutes to get there so we jumped in the car and headed south. Thankfully he had a map so we were able to get there in time. We got some popcorn and watched the movie, which was ok. We had dinner afterwards at Denny's and then after he dropped me off at the house he went back to the city.

It was so normal at the time I didn't realize how special it really was. In the space of the following ten months the cancer would come back with a vengeance, he would live to come to my 30th birthday party (where he would admit that he thought the house was a mistake but that we had done well), Molly and Jon's wedding, and shortly after, die with all of us circled around his bed.

And time and change move on. The theatre we went to closed and then was reborn as the Naz Indian Cinema, only to fold once again and now stands as an empty shell. The Denny's we went to I never have gone back to, but now it's for personal reasons. Newark Java is still there. Paddy learned his skills at Newark Java and now has his own cafe where we sit with laptops and blog on the wireless Internet. Axon went public, Eve was born, Lori's Mother died, Megan was born. I have moved between three jobs, written a book and have three web sites. All in the five years since Jay died, and somehow with all this movement nothing has moved at all and when I sit in that parking lot of the theatre I am then and I think about how precious those moments are and how little we think of them at the time. I think about how simple those times were even when they weren't simple at all, and I know that. But what I really want is Jay back. I want to know what he would think of today.

I hold Megan in my arms in the hallway and we point at pictures of people. We look at the old me in the photos and I say "Dad". We look at the current me, the new me, the old me, and I say "Dad." When we get to Jay I point I say his name and think about how all of us move on but Jay has just stopped.

I don't know what I'm trying to say. Perhaps it's just that I need to remember that these little moments are precious and to stop and to let them sink in. Like the time just recently when I got home in the mid-afternoon from work and took Megan to the park. The sky was crystal blue and Megan was happy. And we rolled around like kids. I was on my back. My eyes were filled with the blue of the sky and Megan came up, laughed and then crawled over me. Kids understand. They live for the moment. It's adults who learn to glide through the years.