I had not visited in a while. I thought I would just go out – it was a sunny day, late afternoon – I got a Frappuccino at Starbucks as I usually do, before the visit – you know – having a coffee beverage with him was a common mom-son event.
I would sometimes get the call or text – as I was wrapping up work – “Mom, can you go by Starbucks and get me a Venti Iced Coffee with three Splendas, puleeeeeze?!” And how could I not?
He needed to be able to stay up and hang-out online with friends. It was a good thing. Those friends turned out to be some real friends, in person – who didn’t know him in person – but, nonetheless felt compelled to come pay respects. I thought that this was something.
It’s been, now, nearly eleven years. As this time of year approaches, I think of the months leading up to the events that turned the page for him. The lighting is changing. Soon it will be hot. School coming into its last months. Remembering the homebound teacher, and her realization that what I was telling them was entirely accurate – not just some excuse for a teenager who did not want to come to school. Imagine that.
I am certain that I will always think about the Starbucks visits – one place to go with a teenaged son where it’s “cool” and the conversation is surrounded by the smell of roasting and brewing coffee. So, we can’t actually go to Starbucks – as I bring Starbucks to wander and talk with him, as I do. This is the way it is.
Astoundingly fast the time goes these days. When we were kids, we used to say “as slow as Christmas” when we thought that something was taking a long time. We were always waiting for Christmas to come around again. The dramatic lead up to the climax of the eve before the big day. Loved “The Christmas Story” movie about the kid and the bee-bee gun – absolutely one of the best Christmas movies out there… Likely, the kid thought that things were indeed moving slowly as he wished and hoped that Santa would deliver his dream!
I was running the other day and had these thoughts, as I do, about this phenomenon of time moving faster as you get older. Well, unfortunately, I forgot it (mostly), as you do, when your endorphins go back down to normal levels after the run. Shit. I hate it when that happens. I lose some of my best insights that way. Sometimes I record these, but then I get nervous and feel like I am on radio. It completely upchucks the thoughts and garbles the original flow. I wish I could invent something that could record these important insights in my brain and not look like really screwed up garbage.
I don’t have the comic strip anymore, but years ago, Dagwood Bumstead (of the comic strip Blondie) awakened and opened up a notepad on his bed stand after having a brilliant flash of insight when he was dreaming – and what he found the next day was a bunch of nonsensical words written down, much to his chagrin. That would be me!
I get a little depressed that my time on earth is now within that realm of “realizable”, as it now has the potential to be no longer than my longest marriage relationship, statistically speaking. In addition to this, we all, as we age, begin to see each year more people taking off due to unexpected circumstances and early-onset illnesses. Big fat finger in your face, reminding you that you are not in control here.
My neighbor told me the story of asking her dad on his 70th birthday, “Dad, how does it feel to be 70?” She said he was not happy being asked that question. He told her to consider how she would feel if she knew that she had more years behind her than the number ahead. I had a similar experience with my Dad when he was in his sixties. He got really grumpy when I made a bad attempt to be humorous about his age. My bad judgment and lack of understanding got me into some deep doo-doo on that one…
Yep, it’s a fact. No matter which flavor of religious affiliation you are, generally speaking, you are mainly being prepared for leaving the planet as you listen to sermons and read about what prophets say. This time of year, the joyousness of the season is infectious and people of various faiths do celebrate The Holidays together as much as they can because it is positive and cheery – everyone feels good, mostly, when they get out and party in a positive way with people.
As an analyst, looking at religions across the spectrum, the preparation for “what’s next” in the human experience and birth-life-death-re-birth (or not) is the one common denominator. We see that some religions more focus on the here and now, and some focus on the within more than the without, and some focus on the after, more than the now, but the departure in all its forms, of leaving the body in which we are living presents a major event horizon that triggers something else in the belief systems of major and minor religious philosophies. Besides Death, Birth is that other one single event that is viewed as important, as it begins a cycle of life on the planet. It is all wondrous and never solved definitively, likely by design by someone or some thing.
People dedicate their entire lives to the solution. They go into the forest by certain trees and sometimes get so far in that they lose sight of the original point that they are trying to solve – or rather the mystery – maybe it is not a problem, just a condition, or a situation. Whatever.
The trees still have green leaves on them where I live. Some of these are supposed to have fallen off, or at least be brown or some other color besides green. We have constant change in our environment that poses big world problems or problems of the planet. We watched the movie, “Interstellar”, the other night. It was one of the physics and math will solve this if someone smart enough can do this in time types of movies with the added aspect of the explorers going outside to look for a new planet, just in case, even though most people will be dead back home because of the time warps and distance issues.
You know – it’s enough to entertain you, and make you a little anxious. Half-facts, with the seasonings and flavorings borrowed from Contact, Mad Max, and other such movies. We didn’t see aliens – they were missing. But then ahead of this, there was the boring war movie that had the alien spaceship and when I am falling asleep watching movies, they tend to merge into one plot. Or I get distracted and the movie isn’t that meaningful, so I go surf the net, or go on Facebook. I mean, how many ways can you slice and dice the plot lines? It’s all about the same thing.
Redux. Is there anything new under the sun? No, not really. It is, as I said in one of my other posts, all matter just recomposed and reconfigured. Stuff just isn’t produced – it is reconstituted. Think about it. How would anything really leave and how would anything else come in? Hmmmm. Think of the options. According to some folks who are “in the know” – it hasn’t happened that anyone can prove… At least not yet, right Agent Scully?
So, what was I saying? Slower than Christmas? Whoever thought that up was just trying to be clever. I am with you.
What I do know is that Humor IS required! Without it, you are sunk. “Bottom of the ocean…”
And before we know it, it will be Christmas Day. We should celebrate something – any aspect of our lives that has reflected positively and gives us hope – definitely, it is a time to reflect on new beginnings and try to not think about the anxieties of the world.
What do I want for Christmas? Twenty-four hours of no television, of good conversation that is not negative, with reflections of good times and gratefulness – peace for a day. Longer if possible. That is what I would like for Christmas this year. Oh, and good health. Yeah, that would be good – for the entire family.
So, I am looking for the little Christmas trees. I look everywhere and realize that they are not in any closets – they are not in the garage. Time to look in the attic. I hate looking in the attic. It’s dusty. It makes my nose itch. There are rats in there. I really don’t want to do this, but then I don’t want to go buy trees if I can find them. I must complete the “exhaustive search.”
“Honey, do you remember seeing the little trees?”
“Nope. Did you look in the garage?”
“Ok, I will. I’ll keep looking until I find them”. The exhaustive search pledge.
It’s a cool day. I hope the rats are asleep. I unlock the door to the attic, flip on the light and there on the floor, right as I open the door, is a pile of my old purses and bags, that used to be in a big old suitcase — but now, they are in a pile, just there on the floor.
I poke around on the pile – just in case a rat is asleep in there. Nothing happens. Most of these old purses and back packs are from over ten years ago, but still are good and useable. I kept them in this old suitcase, because it was dust tight and would preserve them. But here they are on the floor. Exposed. I feel a bit angry, a bit sad, a bit not consulted, but they are important to me and no one else, and someone wanted to use the suitcase for something, I guess…
It gets really hot in the attic. Most stuff will deteriorate in that heat — rapidly. That makes me sad. My stuff just dumped here on the floor. I wonder how long it has been sitting there. Months maybe? Who knows.
As I look around, I see boxes empty that could have been used to place my stuff, but not, so I pull them around and use them to re-store my bags and purses. I will have to figure out something to keep them out of the heat. I have awhile to do this, though.
I come upon a white plastic bag. In it is one of my diaries that I forgot about from ten years ago this past summer. As I look at it, I realize that it is the diary that I kept while my son, Rob, was in the hospital just the time from the spring we learned he would have transplant through transplant, then through the hospitalization afterward until he died. And I wrote in this book when he did pass away – probably that very early morning – and I found those words.
I found other bits of paper stashed in between the pages. Things I wrote down that I needed to remember to do. I kept it all in that little book so that I would not lose track. I guess I abandoned it at some point. I am not sure how it got into that bag, in that big suitcase in that situation where it ended up, dumped on the floor.
I guess that something had me go into the attic today so that I could find it amongst the bags and purses, dumped in a pile on the floor. I guess it was important to empty the big suitcase in a hurry and leave my old bags and purses there exposed. I found the diary. I am glad that I did, in a way. It could have ended up being given away without anyone noticing that it was there.
Strange how grief is. It is a reminder of who we love, and how it happened that they left… and I am of great hope that I will find him again one day — like I found the diary in the pile of my dumped stuff.
