Well, I guess it's that time again. We've been doing this a long time now, and this is the 33rd time. The pictures are by David Handler and Lee Gonzalez, the song by the Oak Ridge Boys: "Thank God for Kids."
When I started playing that song back in 1982, my two kids were 13 and 11. Now my granddaughter Makenzie is 21; my grandson Creighton is 14; and I really don't know where all the years have gone.
That granddaughter of mine is growing up in a hurry, and she had to grow up faster this summer. Her friend Aubree Butts was killed in a traffic accident back in June. She had just finished her sophomore year at Texas A&M in Commerce. She played on the basketball team there.
Aubree was in the back seat of a car on her way back from Paris. It was early in the evening, only about six o'clock. Paris police say they were on the wrong road, a mile from the road they should have been on... a road that led to the end of Aubree's short, sweet life.
She would have turned 21 next week, but now Aubree Butts will be 20 years old forever.
It was an accident. No one was really at fault. The semi that hit their car had the right of way; the young girl driving made a mistake... a mistake she'll carry with her the rest of her life.
I've tried to tell Makenzie why things like this happen in life, but I can't find a good reason why.
I want to tell her the pain will go away, but I know that it won't.
I want to tell her the tears will eventually stop, but I know they don't.
I lost one of my best friends when I was younger than Makenzie is now. He was killed In Vietnam. I've lived 47 years longer than he did, and hardly a week goes by I don't think about him.
And the tears still come, sometimes almost embarrassingly so.
But I have told Makenzie this: I really wouldn't want it any other way. I don't want to forget; I always want to remember how special he was, just like she will always remember how special Aubree was.
My daughter says Aubree was the sweetest girl ever, and if she wasn't , it was a very short list to get to her. She was smart, she was pretty, she was tall and athletic. And she made every room she was in just a little bit brighter.
Aubree doesn't cry anymore. She doesn't hurt anymore. And she has no pain. She doesn't worry about where her life is headed, or the choices she has to make.
The rest of us do. Makenzie does. And she will always do that with a broken heart now, thinking about her friend Aubree, crying many times when she does.
Until someday she, too, will wonder, and she will say: "I really don't know where all the years have gone, but I still remember Aubree."
"Thank God for Kids."
