by Lee Kolinsky

Created on: October 23, 2008

In Your Honor

From the time I was 7, the earliest conversations of death went hand in hand with asking the question of how my parents decided to pick my name. Not knowing who the person I was named after didn't explain the meaning of death to me and I certainly didn't realize that the first initial in my name was dedicated in their honor.

I didn't really begin to understand the concept of death until my youngest brother was born. He was the first person that was named after someone I actually met in life. Though I was very young, I did get a chance to meet my Great Grandmother Gussie for brief time.

By the time I went to my first funeral, I was around nine. I was spared from watching the actual burial of my Great Grandfather Willie and sat in the car with my two younger brothers. At that time, my brothers and I thought he was the inventor of rock candy and couldn't help but wonder if we would ever get any again.

A couple of years later my Great Uncle Mike passed away. I didn't attend that funeral. Not really realizing why I didn't go, I asked my parents several years later as to why I wasn't there. They replied by saying, "He wasn't an actual relative." "He just lived with your grandparents." That was the 1970's.

As time rolled on my family grew up in the 1980's. During that era my brothers and I grabbed some local kids no matter how old they were and played any type of baseball every day, all day, 24/7/365 days a year. It could have been hardball, stickball, wiffle ball, a baseball card game called strata-o-matic, or even a baseball video game.

We played everywhere in town that had a field. We played at the little league field in the school or at the town-park. If we didn't play in those spots, we were at the parking lot of the Jewish Temple, the field at the end of Wynsum Avenue, or at the semi-quite block called Arthur Street. We even played night games at a brightly lit parking lot around the corner from our home. There, we used to hit balls at a van that a local barbershop owned. But mostly, we played wiffle ball on our front lawn were we would constantly hit balls into our frequently annoyed neighbors yard.

When I hit high school in the beginning of the 1990's, I still played ball with my brothers and local friends, but began to forge new relationships with girls and was able to drive my 1973 Cadillac convertible with red vinyl seats and 8-track tape all over town. Unfortunately, as one's life grows, another one's begins to fade. In 1991, my Great Aunt Terri

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