Back on June 24, when I wrote advice to my younger self, I said that if I had the past thirty years to do over I would spend more time drinking really good coffee and looking at the leaves and the light. Last week I said I'd hit the snooze button on the wake-up call I'd gotten with unexpected serious surgery and gone back to not paying enough attention to relishing simple joys such as breathing in all the young energy of my daughter's hockey team or the way our parakeet reacts to the sound of beating eggs.

I'm really paying attention now. It's the strongest reaction I've had to the terrible events of September 11. I walk around with a heightened sense of how short and unpredictable life is, how you have to appreciate this hockey game, today, this conversation with a friend, this display of green and gold and red apples in the supermarket that suddenly symbolizes all that is good and abundant and nourishing in my life.

Today Shawn Dugan is thirty years old. What I just did there is called "bot baiting" -- you include names of people in the material you post on your site, knowing that indexing robots will pick them up. When the people do a google-type search on their name, they'll discover your piece.

As I wrote in the piece linked to, Shawn is a former student who became a virtual member of our family. He is a man who keeps his emotions carefully in check. I haven't heard from him in six years, and neither has a high school friend of his with whom I keep in touch about this. Such behavior is not atypical for Shawn, and we know that he has his reasons.

Shawn joined the United States Marines as soon as he turned eighteen. One of the first things I did after the morning of September 11 was try to remember his term of enlistment -- 6 and 6, as I recall, that is, six years active duty and six years reserves. That meant his obligation was fulfilled last year, although it would not surprise me if he would decide to join this new effort.

The Gulf War began on a Wednesday night in 1991. Ron had just left for choir rehearsal. Lynn was five and a half then, and we were preparing to watch a tape of a tribute to Muppet creator Jim Henson, who had died the year before (and whose birthday, as it happens, is September 24). As the NBC news was ending we saw footage of the first Iraqi anti-aircraft fire streaking through the night sky over the Persian Gulf. I knew that Shawn was already there. What I didn't know then is just how seriously in harm's way he was.

I turned quickly to the Jim Henson program. There was a clip from one of his films -- The Dark Crystal, I think. A gnome-like character was gazing out a doorway watching someone walk away. "He's a rare bird, my friend the soldier. He's somewhere about his business," he said.

I wrote that on a card and tucked it into the corner of the framed picture we keep of Shawn in the living room. He served well and came back safe from the Gulf, and visited us several times in the years that followed before vanishing into himself. 

I keep the words still tucked into the frame. He's still a rare bird, and he's still somewhere about his business.