The Slice: An emotional reflex lives on

The Slice asked about momentarily forgetting that someone is gone.

Hayden’s Sue Jones had been married to husband Tom for 44 years when he died almost four years ago.

Still, on occasion, she will be reading the paper or watching TV and have the thought, “Oh, I have to tell Tom about this.”

Or it can happen when she notes something cute or funny one of the grandkids did or said. “Then the moment passes.”

But there is an even more poignant instant of forgetting that Sue occasionally experiences.

She’ll wake up in the morning and reflexively reach over to do the “tummy tap” to wake Tom and get their day started.

But of course, Tom’s not there.

So Sue takes a breath and remembers all the years he was.

“It is always the memories that get one through.”

Read all about it: “Two score and a year ago, our oldest son, Dave, delivered the afternoon Spokane Daily Chronicle in our Comstock neighborhood,” wrote Gordon Budke. “I would occasionally help and it provided me with the opportunity to learn the names of those in the neighborhood and also learn that some folks only paid their monthly billing (the delivery persons collected door-to-door) when an adult accompanied the youthful carrier.

“As part of the restoration of our garage following the November 2015 windstorm, the professional efforts just completed last week, I had the opportunity (necessity) to do some garage cleaning. I found Dave’s Daily Chronicle carrier bag.”

Now Gordon is wondering what to do with it. (Dave doesn’t want it.) And it occurred to me that perhaps Slice readers might have some ideas also.

Playing with matches: “As kids, my friends and I learned to make match guns with clothes pins,” wrote Keith Hegg. “We inverted the spring and with rubber bands could make a mechanism that would simultaneously light and launch a burning match at others. As the saying goes, it’s all fun and games until a burning match goes down someone’s shirt. But boy, did we have fun.”

Wade Griffith’s list of things he will never understand: Includes law enforcement officers and other first responders who ride motorcycles in their off-duty hours without wearing helmets (even where helmets are not legally required).

“I would think scraping people up off the pavement for a living would teach one the efficacy of helmet protection vs. ‘personal freedom.’ ”

Today’s Slice question: What reference to Spokane in a movie or TV show most surprised you?

Write The Slice at P. O. Box 2160, Spokane, WA 99210; call (509) 459-5470; email pault@spokesman.com. Jim McCall thinks sightings of Hawaii license plates might be the rarest in the Spokane area.