You Can't Go Home Again

As I age I grow more nostalgic. I guess this is normal. At least I hope it is. One of my friends from as far back as 6^th grade, whom I have not seen in the flesh since 1970 posted a picture on facebook today of either him or his brother scraping snow off a car in their driveway back in the early 60’s. I’ve stood in the same spot as the photographer many times. I felt transported back in time briefly and went immediately on a Google image search for more pictures of Acton, MA where it was taken and I’ve always longed for since I left.

I’ve been back exactly twice, once in 1970 when I saw my friend Larry, and a few years ago we stopped nearby in Concord on our way to Maine. I wanted to have a lot of time to reacquaint myself with Acton but found after driving around, showing my wife our old house and a few other spots that there was not much else to do, or least that I could expect would be in anyway meaningful to my wife. Maybe if I had been by myself I could’ve gone over it more slowly and try wrung out more of the past, but I wonder.  

Silence

 I don’t think I’ve ever been aware of total silence. How could I be? There’s none in our pre-natal state what with Mom’s heartbeat and other organs working overtime. We enter the world crying. 

The closest I’ve come lately and it wasn’t silent but it was very pleasant was 12 years ago when my father in law passed away. We were in Western North Dakota for his funeral and the day after my son and I drove a few miles out of town and stopped by a river. All I could hear was birds, water and the wind in the grass.  We spent a week on a big lake in Maine a few years ago that was pretty close to that experience too except for the occasional boat going by.Now due to the oil boom there are huge trucks everywhere there 24/7 there not to mention all the other activity that accompanies an economic boom.

I live in the city, my house isn’t far from the main road so I hear traffic and sirens.  The traffic’s not so bad but the sirens I’m pretty sick of them.  My dog either loves them or hates them, I can’t tell which but he howls when he hears one.  

The TV is almost always on.  I run a fan in the bed room to block out all the other noise. Besides that my ears ring, sometimes quite loudly. Complete and total silence might be like being dead. I can wait.

More random than usual

Remember the huge round ball that resembles a cage with a maniac on motorcycle riding around the inside you’d see at the circus?  If your head starts to feel like that inside, please seek help.  Mine? Maybe one of those plastic tricycles that were popular with kids back in the …well whenever that was.

I had cataract surgery on both eyes in May, now I only need glasses for working all day and reading books or a computer when I’m not at work. 

It’s a strange sensation driving without them though.  My son was looking at me the other day and I guess thinking about the recent surgery and asked me “are those bags under your eyes supposed to be there?”  Hell no! They’re not supposed to be there, but due to age and genetics they are.   I was surprised to see how much gray I had in my hair too. 

I read somewhere good blogs are about other people not the writer.  I have strong opinions on people like Michele Bachmann but I like to save them to irritate people on facebook.  However, she seems to me to be a classic demagogue. 

I see Gabrielle Giffords made her first public appearance.  I can’t imagine how messed up she might be.  Her recovery has been reported as near miraculous but my friend Jennifer who is  in the brain injury business says she’ll be significantly impaired. It’s hard to see how she could be otherwise.  We now have a clue as to why you can’t let your brain get as described above.  Guns and mental illness just don’t work out well and we have too much of both.  

A dark and stormy morning

The rain is blowing sideways outside right now. The series of severe thunderstorms and hundreds of tornadoes they spawned is unprecedented in my memory but I have to admit I haven’t studied the past history.  They do demonstrate as do other natural phenomena how tenuous our existence on the earth really is.  We don’t really know for sure just how violent and earthquake can be for instance.  Just because we’ve only been able to measure up to a magnitude of 9.5 so far doesn’t mean a 12.9 won’t hit somewhere tomorrow. 

The fact that the soft, warm, comforting, relaxing breeze that seems to caress can in very short order cut a tremendous swath of destruction though not just a trailer park, but a hub of human activity is mind boggling to me.

 I’m beginning to think that perhaps if there is an apocalyptic event it won’t be a nuclear war or aliens or even a deadly virus.  We may be decimated by weather and geophysical events.  Whether it’s merely a reaction of chemistry and physics brought on by what we’ve done to the earth’s troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere and so on or, the earth decides on its own we’ve become a pest that it needs to rid itself of us, it could happen in large enough quantities and close sequences to seriously reduce the population of the earth.  Then, there’s always that meteor. Keep watch dinosaurs.

The Parents Curse

Without going into too much detail, I’m a believer now.  I’m still hoping I won’t suffer as badly as my parents did at my hand although I suppose I deserve to.  What goes around comes around…

I can hardly believe how little I cared what hell I put my parents through (I had brief moments of regret, 5 minutes at most every so often) and now am finding out in a so far lesser measure what it feels like and it’s hard to swallow. 

Oh well. There will be an end to it eventually, but it may be a while. 

Unstuck in Time

Remember Billy Pilgrim? 

I was searching for the source of a phrase that turned out to be a line from a song and ended up on a page that had a picture of a young Swedish woman apparently a singer that looked very much like my mother when she was about 20.  It was startling to say the least to see what she might look like if she was young today. 


My mother could have been a professional entertainer too had she not been raised as Lutheran farm girl in rural Minnesota. Maybe in one of those other universes...