It's Not Where You Live, It's The Truck You Drive

By CURT CLARK

Published: Aug 01, 2008 12:00 am

Itâs Not Where You Live,

Itâs The Truck You Drive

To the Editor:

Wow! This is great! We purchased Echlerâs Cove so we can launch our boats and have a area for our families and friends to enjoy. I canceled my annual dockage on Candlewood Lake (a savings of $2,600) and bought a brand new trailer for the boat (a little over $5,000), but what the heck, in 20 years it will even out with the minimal $100 annual fee for launching at Echlerâs each year.

Whoooo! Wait just a minute. I have property taxes on the brand new trailer payable to the town â hmmmm â OK, thatâs OK, we all must pay our fair share.

Wait â Ohhhh â Wait I canât get a permit to launch with the registration off my boat trailer â I need to go out and buy a big truck to pull the boat to the launch and not use my buddyâs truck in Monroe.

Forget that the trailer and boat are registered and licensed in Newtown, itâs the vehicle that pulls it to the launch that counts â I guess I could wheel the boat down on 30-plus dollies and that would be OK.

What are the town managers thinking?

The only way any of the citizens of Newtown can enjoy the benefits of the purchase of Echlerâs Cove is if we all go out and buy a big truck.

Bye, bye, bye, more of your hard-earned money â but more in Newtownâs because of the additional property taxes collected for that nice new truck.

Gary P. Frey

10 Great Ring Road, Sandy HookÂ Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â July 29, 2008

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To the children and their parents: I have delayed this message for eight months because I was in a dark place following the last two of my nine surgeries, in December and February. I apologize for the lack of clarity that resulted. Now again in the light, I want to express my sincerest and deepest gratitude for the life you have given me. For the honor and privilege and indescribable responsibility you have bestowed upon me, as your children’s pediatrician. Twenty five years ago, I was brought to Sandy Hook to practice alongside a friend and colleague. We built something together. And then life, in its stark and brutal efficiency, took that away. A spinal cord injury following the first of those surgeries almost broke me. Just months after that, our community also fractured. The deaths at Sandy Hook Elementary School occurred soon after my paralysis. I learned to walk again—or rather, I had accepted that I would never walk normally, when the loss of life—the only lives I have ever lost in my career as a pediatrician—brought me to my knees. This is what I learned. Three decades of pediatrics have taught me to Live—Love—Learn—Laugh—Listen—Lead. Not in the order you may think or that we may have learned, but in the order we actually come to living a meaningful life. You cannot learn if you don’t listen. You cannot listen if you cannot laugh at yourself—as I have many times in an exam room acting and being ridiculous. You cannot laugh unless you feel free to love—and I truly loved your children, not as abstractions, but as the specific, irreplaceable persons they are. You cannot love without living fully in the present moment. And living fully allows you to lead. Leading requires understanding what you can control and accepting what you cannot. Everything else simply follows. To chase what you cannot control, to chase what follows, is to run behind, never catching what the moment brings. Babies still make me cry. After nearly thirty years, they still make me cry. Two cells become a living human with infinite potential. There is something inexplicable and unknowable in that transformation. I have never grown past that, never wanted to. It is the source of my own personal faith and spirituality. Physics teaches us that energy is never lost. I believe the energy instilled in a child—the force that makes them who they are—is forever. It never truly vanishes. It changes form. It is unique to each living creature. It moves through us, between us, around us. You can feel it in a newborn’s grip. You can see it in a child’s eyes when they recognize you and smile. You can sense it in a room when a family holds their baby for the first time, or says goodbye for the last time. Whatever that energy is— life, spirit, potential, love—it persists. Changed by time, expressed differently by each person, but it remains around us, if not part of us. Anyone who has loved and lost has felt it. Perhaps, unexplained, it is simply accepted as a feeling. I believe it is more complex and never knowable by us, at least not now, not here, as we know space-time. No pediatrician or parent in this community could ever fail to acknowledge how the school shooting tore our community apart. Forever grieving, I will not be defined by that darkness. Instead, I have chosen to be defined by my love of the color purple. I choose butterflies, horses, and whales. I choose kindness and neurodiversity. I choose the memory of our children as they lived and as they were, not by how they were taken. I remember them. I have spoken out and will continue to act. But I will not be imprisoned by that day. I choose laughter as it is the best and sometimes only medicine; and I choose to laugh and lose rather than win and want. 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It's Not Where You Live, It's The Truck You Drive

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