Shamans say the veil between those that have moved on and our earthly plane is thinner during the week before All Hallows Eve which is why you ought to pay attention to your dreams because you might have visitors.
My own thoughts have been drawn towards the evening sky looking for my own north star while listening to a song only one other can hear.
Just before 1 AM I read a final message, set down my phone and send out a silent message wondering if it will be received.
Morning will come and I will wake up confused and disoriented about a variety of things but it will take hours before I remember I could smell a cigar.
Some of you will wrinkle your nose but not I, that smell always reminds me of my grandfathers and it is like a security blanket for me.
If I had more time today I would have set out for the smoke shop in Grapevine and stood inside because the smell would have filled me with good memories of time spent with my grandfathers.
Would I have bought a cigar?
Maybe. 🙂
Eight years ago my maternal grandfather decided he was tired of life without grandma and checked out.
He was 97 and had spent the bulk of those years with grandma. It was a good run, 76 years of marriage is a feat most won’t match.
Sometimes I would tease him and ask if he got an extra 25 years when grandma started wearing hearing aids.
He’d raise his hand and pretend he was going to smack me and we would both laugh.
Had my paternal grandfather done the same I would have ducked, but that is a different story and we’ll ignore it for now.
They were both incredibly important to me and different me, but they had a variety of similarities.
Anyhoo, going to back to grandmothers who are hard of hearing we might speak about the time grandma walked by and grandpa told me she had a nice ass for a 90 year-old woman.
I suppose I made a face because he laughed and got serious.
“You see your grandmother and I see the girl I married.”
I said it sounded sweet but that I didn’t think grandma would appreciate him referring to her like that.
Grandpa laughed and told me she had gone deaf years before she started wearing hearing aids.
“You don’t make it this far without losing your hearing intentionally.”
“Good point grandpa, I’ll share that one day. It will be part of a book called Another Story About That Silver…Man.”
Grandpa laughed and I told him there was still time to start training for my big idea.
“C’mon Grandpa, we’re going to sell you to Nike and Reebok as the world’s fastest not quite a hundred-year-old. The book will be part of it. You fell through on the pony, now work on helping me get a few million.”
Grandpa laughed again and told me that I had learned something about telling stories from my grandfathers.
Been a hell of a day and tomorrow has the potential to be more of the same so I sit here decompressing and trying to figure out if there is a way to make it easier.
Doesn’t appear to be which makes me think it is too bad I can’t rely upon my favorite way to relax and haven’t any cigars to distract myself with, not that I have had any cigars in forever anyway.
A parade of memories flow by and I see a guy in my head confuse Otis Day and the Knights with Otis Redding.
Shout is a fun song to screw around with but it doesn’t have the same oomph as Hard to Handle and “I can love you better than him” but memories are funny like that.
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Had a couple of conversations today where I wondered if the people who were speaking had run headfirst into the wall 0r had taken heavy doses of stupidity serum prior to our conversations.
Especially in one case where I would have expected they would have anticipated the only way I would have agreed was to have taken a baseball bat and beaten me into a coma.
It was one of those WTF moments where I wanted to ask if their goal was to ensure I did the exact opposite of what they suggested.
The rules of the blog demand I acknowledge it doesn’t necessarily require much for me to decide to take the road not taken or to ignore what is being asked of me.
I can be ornery, adversarial and independent but I can also be exceptionally easy to manage and get along with.
Some people know how to do this and some people are oblivious.
That is the joy of life, what’cha gonna do.
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Can’t go back in time to change the things that need to be changed nor to take a different path than the one I am on.
Can only go forward but that doesn’t mean I have to do as I always have so I won’t.
Just got to get through one more day followed by another and than another.
That is what the grandfathers told me and what I’ll tell my grandchildren. Depending on how things go during the next few there might be some moves that will lead to paradise or at least the path to.
Call it fate, luck, providence or reward based upon action– just call it something.
I can feel the changes coming, wonder what it will all look like.
