Dear Ferret Folks-

It's come around again, August 9th. Every year I face it wide-eyed
and quiet. Mindful. And every ear I am a year older, and it all means
something slightly different to me. August 9th, 2007 was the day that
my dear ferret friend Todd Leuthold was murdered. I am sure that there
are some of you out there who remember the shock of it, and there are
probably more of you who don't recognize the name at all. Time passes,
folks leave the FML, new ones appear. And it has been four years, after
all. That's a long time in our increasingly busy lives.

For those of you who were not here then, Todd was a frequent
contributor to the FML. He called his business "The Fuzzbutt Rodeo
Clowns" and Todd himself was a clown. When he posted to the FML it was
usually to say something funny. He could be *wickedly* funny. The two
of us were both occasional insomniacs, waking up in the wee hours and
chatting online. It isn't that easy to make me laugh, but he could make
me laugh out loud and often did. I am something of a clown, too and it
was delightful, competing to see who could be the most witty, the most
outrageous. Lord, but he made me laugh!

He dealt with some very serious issues. He was a fragile diabetic,
only 50 and in deteriorating health. That had everything to do with
why, when drug-addled thugs broke into his house for the cash in his
pocket and his big screen TV he didn't survive the beating they gave
him. The thugs fled and all were apprehended by the police in pretty
short order. One drove away from the scene and crashed the car when
the police chased him. So he simply locked his doors and smoked the
rest of the crack while the police cut the car open with the jaws of
life machine. Wouldn't want to waste perfectly good crack, after all.
All of the thugs were convicted of some degree of homicide during the
commission of a home invasion/burglary. They take that seriously in
the State of Pennsylvania. All are serving sentences of two or three
decades in state prison. Who knows what that will really amount to
given prison crowding and the fact that they are pretty much flat
busted in Pennsylvania, just as they are everywhere else these days.
I do not doubt that they are having a miserable time, and that's fine
with me.

Todd had also had some serious legal problems a few years before his
death. Nobody on the FML knew about them, myself included, until after
his death. We have all done things that we bitterly regret, and Todd
had his fair share. It made the shock of his death doubly shocking. It
made me wonder how people would view me if all of my dirty laundry were
pulled out for inspection and I weren't around to defend myself, or at
least explain how I'd let things get that bad and how I'd worked to
make things right with the world. Todd had worked at making things
right. The price of redemption is steep, indeed. It only comes about
with sweat equity. You have to do the heavy lifting, there is no other
way to make things right. I don't know that he could ever have really
made things right, but it comforted me that he tried, he tried. I think
about how afraid he must have been that we in the ferret word would
find out. We make our own hells, don't we?

Todd had eleven ferrets in his business. They were out and about in
the house when the thugs pushed their way in. The thugs left the front
door ajar when they fled, and some of the ferrets were never found. The
police did try to catch them at the scene, but they were pretty busy
and they didn't know how many they should look for. Thanks to some
excellent FML people all the ferrets were re-homed. My ferret, Todd,
is named for my friend, Todd.

I tell this story pretty much every year on the FML. Why? To remember
my friend, yes. He doesn't seem quite so...gone when I take the time to
make these posts. Every year, more and more of what he posted to the
web disappears. For a long time I had some of our e-mail conversations
saved on my computer, and I would look at them sometimes, and laugh.
Then I had a computer crash, and a little more of him was lost. I
suppose that is the way things happen, it's normal. Time passes. They
say that someone is never really gone as long as one person remembers
them. I will never forget, never.

I said that each year I have a different reaction to his death, I
reflect on some new aspect of the loss and that seems right. Time
constantly re-models us, like clay. I am not the same woman I was
four years ago. None of us are exactly the same people we once were.
We...evolve, for want of a better term. This year I am thinking about
friendship. How I succeed as a friend, how I fail. I am not good at
keeping in touch with the people I care about. I never have been good
at keeping in touch but I am trying to do better, and I will be making
some calls today to people that I haven't spoken to in a while. I hope
that I can inspire some of you to pick up the phone today and make that
call you've been meaning to make but just haven't gotten around to. Do
it for Todd.

Alexandra in MA

[Posted in FML 7148]