dtwaaz 2009-07-22 05:47:53
In dreams I see the creek with choppy water. I'll keep looking.troubled
So odd, and alarming. I had an hour to kill before sleep. It's long past that now, and I should get up in a few hours.I thought to look up some friends I hadn't heard from for a long time. Most times when I have an hour, I wander through cold cases rather than search for living people.
This time I went looking for my old roommate from when I lived in Texas after my divorce. I was going to visit him close to 2 years ago thinking I could skip up to Kentucky after a day to see my Aunt and over to DC to a drum dance event at the Capitol. He thought my excursion plans were silly. We talked daily for awhile. He had a new girlfriend. She was there once when we were chatting. He seemed happy.
I didn't go. We had not spoken after that.
So I googled him tonight, put in his name and State. Maybe he had a blog.
Instead I found news. There was a person with his name charged just a few days ago with a very serious crime that occurred in 2007, and looking further I found his photo associated with it! His girlfriend died. That girl back then.
I'm sure he would not have hurt her. I remember that he is very kind to people. He saved his pet cat from a severe infection even though she annoyed him, as well did I. He also paid special attention to people with a hard life and checked up on them, like the landlady after he moved out, and people that others might reject for their problems. He had a great friend in a lady I remember as Ronnie. He grieved her so when she died. I just remember that she had a house on a canal and a parrot that went with her on her shoulder everywhere. They always irked me because they all thought I was strange and insecure. I sang alot in my apartment, and played the piano keyboard all day when not at work. Is that strange? But I always respected how much he cared about them, and he's always been my friend.
I don't know what to think.
I feel very badly for him. He got away and worked so hard to better his life and made it. I fear he will lose it all.
I don't know if he deserves to, or what happened.
It just makes me afraid.
You can get anything you want…
Every quarter we have a conference, and for the past few years, I've handled the theme decorations, sometimes homemade, or gleaned from scouring the dollar store and Oriental Trading on-line. Quite often, it's pretty late in the game when we finalize the theme, or switch it. Sometimes I'm a little unfamiliar with the theme. One theme last year was soccer, so I purchased a bunch of mini hackeysack soccer balls, logo'd whistles, and flags from different countries to place on fields of patio artificial turf from the hardware store for centerpieces. I asked..."are there lines on a soccer field?"..I would paint them on..but wrong game, doh, so I didn't. It looked nice...We have very few stores to sort through for specialty items, a Walmart and a dollar tree, both carrying a small amount of craft supplies. Our Walmart specializes in scrapbooking supplies and quilting fabric. Those themes are unlikely to come up.
There's this remarkable little shop in the local mall called "All that Glitters". It reminds me of the hoarder that I may become, because it is cluttered with oddities from different eras, like my mind. The shop is small and difficult to maneuver, and you are overwhelmed by the many little things all piled together, to the point you don't recognize them. I always ask "do you have...?" There's been a different employee there each time I've wandered through, and so far, they've always had what I'd been seeking. It can be pretty strange.
Last quarter, we needed to create a wise guru who was like Yoda, Dumbledore, and the Dalai Lama put together, a master, a great teacher, a "tongue-in-cheek" wise man on the mountain...who looked like Yoda - okay :s The team had a tunic and robe. I went to the magical store and asked, "do you have a wizard hat, not so wizardy and pointy? The shopkeep led me to a dark corner overflowing to the ceiling with hats, so I explained that the wizard had to look like a great teacher, and she pulled out a perfect velveteen royal blue hat (within a few seconds)that was fashioned after something from the renaissance, a cross between a cap worn at graduation and something wise and wizardy. Then I thought, "oh, he's supposed to look like Yoda." I asked her if she had any pointy ears, and a yin & yang symbol prop, and of course, she did. Our sage looked wonderful. We had a technical wizard of our own who video-taped the wise man's sequence against a serene, palatial background at the local high-school.
This quarter's theme is disco. I'm out of time. Some of the items I've ordered haven't arrived, and an inexpensive disco light set arrived, non-working. I picked up some sequined fabric for the table tops on dark blue backdrop and figured out a back up plan if the rest of what I ordered doesn't get here. I didn't have an outfit. Looking back to the era, I guess I dressed more like a hippie rather than a dancing queen. I went over to the little shop and said, "I don't suppose you have a disco ball." A totally different lady was there and she looks up to think, and says, "I think I've seen one around here," leading me to a perfect real rotating (small) disco ball, mirror glass and all. I didn't want to spend much and asked if she had some cheap plastic set of lights, but she didn't. I decided to get it anyway. It was much nicer than I planned to buy. There was a multi-colored sequined shirt in my size in the corner on the wall behind the head of a moose that "mooed?" when you walked by. It's probably been there for years. So I got that and a matching sequined gold hat. When she rung it all up, she only charged me $35.00. "I checked with my boss, and today, it's all on sale", she said.
Thankyou, thankyou, thankyou for being in our community.
there would be sunlight
Somewhere, up there is the sun.I like to see it in my dreams and day dreams where I lay atop my car on a beach in Texas, and the waters and sand are warm. 20 years ago, it was enjoyable. These days, any sporadic break into daylight gives me ocular migraines.
My daughter very much liked the "Twilight" movie. I told her it was filmed up in the rainforest. She called today to say she had also read the book, and wondered how I could stand it up here with the all the rain and lack of sunlight. It's a work of fiction. It seems so strange for someone to say "I know what it's like up there in the Pacific NW, because I read it in a story about vampires." Nevertheless, it's true.
This winter when the storms are absent, there is fog. I had an illuminating experience one evening in the dark, in the fog. It had to do with a photograph from the past. The photo depicts a brilliant view of trees at sunset overlooking a pond. The colors are wonderful, and I've tried to find the spot where the picture was taken. It's in a drawer, and I hadn't thought of it for a couple of years now. About a month or so ago, I was driving home from another town at twilight and the fog wisping over the road became very dense, requiring me to watch the outer edge of the road. My view was focused and there was nothing else visible to distract my attention, until I saw a glimmer of water through a break in the fog. It was far down away from the road in a valley. I don't recall having seen any water there before in that area (and this was long before the floods of last week.) Suddenly I could also see the tree line in dark silhouette, and thought, "well, that's it, from the photo." From the direction, I noted that I'd been searching for the sunset, and all along it was the dawn. It was appropriate to consider, "Why do I see the end of day, rather than a beginning?" Most of the time in the fog, I am lucky to just to see the road. I surmised that it was the fact that there were no distractions that I noticed the pond.
---
I really enjoyed that vision in the fog, but as far as I can tell now, it wasn't real. Wherever I was, I can't find it in the day. Maybe it was just a trick of the mind, a half-slumber or just imagining forms in the clouds on the road.
Oh well, real or not...lesson learned. Focus, and begin again.
snow and more snow
It's snowing again...Grrr or BrrrOn Christmas day, I chopped the snow on the deck into igloo blocks and tossed them off into the middle of the yard and shoveled about a quarter of the way down the street to try to get out. We had been blocked in for a couple weeks.
Of course it all melted two days later.
But it's back. Grrrr.
The good news is that I had the deck rebuilt last year, because the wood had rotted, so it is still standing.
