In Memory of Charlie. Clear Creek, Colorado, 2016
“Don’t shoot ’til it hits you in the pit of your stomach.” —Lisette Model, 1901-1983
You will find this (if you look long and hard, and if you are very, very lucky) somewhere along the bank of tumbling Clear Creek, just below the grade of the twisty and narrow Highway 6, west of Golden, Colorado.
What happened here? Who was Charlie?
Was it an auto accident? Did a car slide off of the highway embankment above and plunge into the creek on some blizzard-slick winter night? Or was it a tubing or rafting accident? Does the toy animal indicate that Charlie was a child? It seems very likely.
There surely is a tragic story here.
It also gave me a bit of an emotional jolt to the pit of my stomach for another, more personal, reason…
You see, I lost my one and only uncle on my mother’s side–Uncle Charlie, as it happens–when I was barely a teenager and Charlie was in his late twenties. It was an electric shock to the entire family, of course. Some sort of heart condition apparently.
I have always missed him and his movie star, young Elvis-like, looks and demeanor. I felt cheated out of a really cool uncle who took me for rides in his dune buggy–then his Corvette.
What would it have been like to live all these intervening years with him around?
My missing uncle. Charlie.
Coincidence that I should happen upon this memorial along a very random and nondescript section of Clear Creek today?
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