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February, 2007
Letters to the Editor
1/22/07
To: John Mudano
Ref. Your essay “The Common Man’s Will to Kayak”
When I go to bed each evening, I reread your essay about the Common Man, and more often than no, I cry a little. Then I usually doze off. This is my routine.
Seth was my firstborn and he remains very special to me. He lost his Mom to cancer when he was a little kid, 8 years old, and when he was 14, I sent him away to High Moving School in Wilton, NH. After he had been there nearly a month, I received a phone call from the school and was told that Seth had been run over by a logging trailer and was in the Peterborough Hospital in critical condition. I immediately got in my car and headed up to NH. One of the trailer’s wheels ran over his midsection and fortunately there wasn’t any bleeding. I stopped every hour or so while en route and called the hospital to inquire if there was any urinary bleeding. My instructions to the hospital were that if urinary bleeing started, to take him to Boston. Fortunately , bleeding never started. I arrived in Peterborough in the wee hours and stayed with him for a couple days until he was discharged.
It seems that he and a bunch of other kids were playing in the woods and were jumping on and off a trailer loaded with a a few tons of logs. Seth fell off the front end of the trailer and one of the wheels ran over his midsection – between his pelvis and his ribcage.
Well John, I concluded that there was something special about Seth. He was here for a purpose and it was not to be deterred. So, when I learned of Seth’s having been diagnosed with IPF, and of the prognosis, I was quite understandably shaken. But there was, and still is, a tiny little something inside of me that gives me faith in Seth’s powers of survival. He is indeed a Common Mane, but possessed of an uncommon quality.
Ray Kallman
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