Rememoring

I realize I need to post pictures and some information from my trips to Metro Ministries in NYC. I’ll get to that; right now it is soon going to be time for the carriage to turn into a pumpkin and the coachmen into mice. Before Cinderella hears the church bells and has to walk home, I just wanted to post again some things running through my head.

It was a pretty nice day here in the Shenandoah Valley today. We have just 4 more days of March left and then it is April. I have an eye appointment on Friday. I am struggling with focusing problems and it is really serious at work where much of what I need to read is in very small founts. I am hoping the problem is easily rectified. I’d really hate to lose my eyesight. But I know others have and life goes on. Just make being independent more challenging.

We woke up to a 2 or 3 inch covering of snow this morning. It was cold but not frigid. By early afternoon all of the snow was gone. Virginia Commonwealth University outlasted Kansas University this afternoon in the NCAA semi finals of 2011 March Madness. North Carolina University gave Kentucky a hard run and a pretty good scare, but the Wildcats prevailed. So the final 4 has shaped up to be the UConn Huskies, the Blue Grass state Wildcats, the VCU Rams and the Butler Bulldogs. Duke, Arkansas, Kansas, Michigan, North Carolina and a host of other familiar names get to watch this final four on TV. I wonder if anyone picked this group. I sure wouldn’t have.

Georgiann and I are “making progress” on our kitchen. I think I am going to take some vacation in a week or so and spend some consecutive hours and days on things. It is hard to get motivated when you only have an hour or so to work. I have found my schedule suddenly leaning hard towards mid shifts which means leaving the house about 9am and getting home about 8pm. Ugh. Ruins the day.

My thought pattern today has been monopolized by reflections on a number of incidents in my past. Not my past life, I try to not think too much about that. I haven’t really shared too much of my past life with others because it seems to trouble them. My friends and family see me as belonging only to the current life and I think trying to understand about former things is difficult. So I won’t go into that now. I can tell you that Evita Peron was as nice as she was beautiful. To me at least. I may never get over her.

Several incidents in my life stand out and seem to re-develop in my mind frequently. The most life changing one I know of I think about often, but never talk about. It can’t be undone and what has not been is lost. I think of a couple of situations with employers that I wish I had handled better. A couple of decisions that I wish I had thought through better. Missed opportunities and possibilities. But mostly I wonder how I got so blooming old as fast as I did. It seems so like a few days ago I was walking the streets of Okmulgee and staring at the old Creek, Cherokee, and Seminole Indian men as they sat around the Creek Council House bound by 6^th and 7^th and Morton and Grand streets. I think the next time I get to Okmulgee I am going to get my cousin Jimmy to go up to the council house with me. He and I used to explore the place when we were very young. Jimmy lives just north of Okmulgee on his grandparent’s farm. They are both gone now, but he and his wife Suzie live there beside Jimmy’s parents. I can remember sitting in the living room of the granddad Fuller’s house and eating peanuts out of his fields. Peanuts were once a big crop in Oklahoma. May still be, I don’t know. The biggest adventure for kids our age was going to the bathroom after dark in the outhouse situated as I remember it at the back end of the chicken yard. Barefooted, of course. Nothing in there you might step on could be as bad as a “sticker.” Those stickers could take out a bicycle tire in a heartbeat. They were vicious. I have now idea what their real names were.

I remember going to the Okmulgee main fire station just north a couple of blocks of Main Street. Dad would either go into the day room on the ground floor behind the engine bays to play dominoes or Pinochle or climb the long flight of stairs to the second floor where the kitchen, showers and bunk rooms were and watch early TV broadcasts of MLB in black and white. It always looked like it was snowing to beat the band on the field, but it was cool.

We never told mom what we did at the fire station. She didn’t approve. Dad always tried to talk me into sliding down the brass pole that was in the middle of the bunk room floor. I was always chicken. He’d laugh, reach out and wrap his arms around the pole and disappear through the floor. You never put your hands on the pole. It made it tarnish. You always reached around it and grabbed your opposite shoulder. I always wanted to be there when a fire alarm came in so they’d see they needed a 7 or 8 year old boy to complete a crew. I was there a few times, but they always figured they could handle things without me. I was OK with that. Somebody needed to stay and cover other incidents.

Sometimes Jimmy and I would walk the railroad tracks and HE would pull up the loose spikes. I always hoped no trains derailed because I didn’t want to have to testify against my own cousin in court. I didn’t know if they even had prison clothes small enough to fit him. And I didn’t even know where really bad criminals were sent. But he turned out OK. Except he sold insurance for a while. I think he finally got saved and quit.

In those days the alleys behind the houses were mostly two depressions in the ground with crab grass growing so good I am sure someone had to mow the alley. Now I wonder why I remember that. 55 years ago I used to climb the tree in Grandma Mary’s back yard at the alley and sit there hiding from Billy and Yvonne and looking at the grass growing in the alley like no one ever drove through there. And I still remember it. But I can’t keep track of my passwords I created last week. Somebody must be laughing at us somewhere.

Last night at Amari’s 4^th birthday party my oldest son, Todd, asked to borrow my Nikon Digital camera. So when I got home I changed the battery and cleared pictures I had still had on it. At full 6 megapixels it can store 291 pictures. I dropped it off today after church. He said he wanted to take it to Disney World, in May. MAY? It’s only March. Oh well, it does take some learning to get really good pictures out of it. There are a byzillion settings on it. It does have fully automatic settings but that’s no fun.

And that’s some of what has been running through my brain. And some early ideas for adding trim to the house. We are going to put up crown, chair and panel molding. We’ve done all of it a few times except the panel trim. I’ve only put up panel trim in one house in the living room. But it really set the room off. Gave it a more luxurious feel. Sweet looking. We are also going to paint all of the wood work white. We have the kitchen cabinet doors off now painting them. Slow process. Georgiann had to scrub them down, now we are sealing them with an oil base primer so the stain doesn’t leech through, and will paint them gloss white. The new hardware will be brushed nickel.

Well, I heard the church bells 45 minutes ago and kept on writing. Later.