The days of the wolf blurred into the nights of the hungry moon and those gifted with vision saw possibilities and opportunities that others couldn’t perceive.
Turn on the music, close your eyes and let the ethereal take you places, if you dare.
We’re in that period of time where the sages say the decrees will be issued and some of us will find the threads that keep us attached to this plane are going to be…cut.
Been a very strange time for a multitude of reasons some of which I can explain and understand and are others are beyond me.
Find myself feeling like I can almost reach the answers but only if I don’t focus hard upon them because it is the equivalent of holding water in the palm of your hands.
Some will leak out from between your fingers but if you hold still not all will.
Hold still and that thought or memory you are chasing will pause long enough for you to see and read it, but try to grab it and it will run.
The children tell me they don’t remember seeing pictures of grandpa climbing the side of the mountain and ask me if I am making it up.
I shake my head no and tell them I grew up with those pictures of dad hanging on the wall.
We move on to a different topic and I talk about wandering through the Judean desert, trips though the Negev and how it was easier ito run down Masada when I was 16 then at 25 but I would do it again now.
A teenage boy and I go back and forth again about how to make smart decisions and I tell him sometimes you cannot figure it out.
Sometimes you have to just go for it and then see what happens.
I wonder if he really hears me and understands what his old man is willing to do. I wonder if he recognizes how much I understand and remember and figure he probably doesn’t.
Why?
Because I didn’t and I certainly didn’t recognize what it took for my folks to join the Peace Corps and go off on the adventure they had.
Probably because I figured if they did that it must not have been that big a deal.
But looking at it now I think about how communication was so very different and international travel was a much bigger deal.
It occurs to me how much I have forgotten about being a kid. They tell me we flew to San Francisco when I was an infant but I didn’t get on a plane again until I was 16.
That was a hell of a summer. Got evacuated from a forest fire, spent one night at a hotel near LAX and then flew to JFK for a brief layover and then headed off to Israel with 150 or so other teens.
Stopped at de Gaulle for a ridiculous 6 hour layover and eventually made it back to LA for a week or two before heading off to Hawaii to celebrate my grandparent’s 50th wedding anniversary.
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One of these days I’ll do a better job of memorializing that summer and I’ll outline more of the adventures and experiences.
For the moment I’ll add one more piece to this puzzle.
My grandparents flew all of us out to Hawaii, parents, siblings, aunt etc. I flew back home ahead of everyone because I had to register for high school.
I didn’t think twice about flying by myself because as I said, by that time I felt like I had spent so much time airborne a 5.5 hour flight was easy.
And I was going to have the house to myself for about five days so I was ecstatic.
The part as a parent that sticks out to me the most today is I was the first to go that school.
I was entering 10th grade and had never attended so it was brand new to me. We didn’t have cellphones or email and long distance was expensive.
If there had been a problem with registering I would have been stuck but I don’t think any of us worried about it. Don’t know if it was ever a thought, I certainly don’t remember it.
And like I said, by that time I had been through a fire, traveled around a foreign country in a group and alone. Hell, we spent an entire weekend on our own in Israel, not too shabby for a 16 year-old.
Could debate whether it made me overconfident or not, but there is probably no point debating what did or didn’t happen 34 years ago.
Nothing but good memories now.
It is time to back and see the parts and pieces of me that are waiting for my return. Time to shake things up a bit, time to shed the shackles.
There were several moments today that highlighted how very strange life has been and how very much it feels like I have been successfully sailing through stormy waters.
Not sailing as a regular captain or full on buccaneer but something between.
Busy showing what it is like to live as Emerson writes in his essay on self-reliance while handling responsibilities.
Told a few people to get on board or get out of the way and had them ask who I thought I was.
“I can tell you who I once was and I can tell you who I am but I can’t tell you who I am going to be.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Don’t worry about it, that is my concern and I have my ideas. Got to run, there are things to do before I find out whether I am sealed in the Book of Life or if the malach hamavet and I get to dance.
