Nearing The End of April
The days are longer, walking in with soft daybreaks and shuffling out with glowing coral sunsets, and the early, surprising heat has modulated itself back to where it should be, and it would be easy to unwind at least eighteen of the hours of the day outside under the dome of pollen and barnswallows and floating spider webs.
I’ll get this out of the way first — I haven’t even tried to work on my memoirs for a while. There are some things, some images and events that are too evocative of too much rawness, and my instincts tell me to sidestep them for a little while until it’s time to stand still and let them catch up. A while, a little while, a little while.
In the course of my duties yesterday on my work-from-home job, I had the pleasure to talk to a nun from a convent in Rhode Island. It was a delightful twenty minute conversation, and at the end, the nun informed me that she and her sisters maintain a daily prayer book in the convent, and that she would add Mrs. Orr and me to the book, and that the nuns would pray for us regularly. Such little moments mean so very much when one’s spirit feels bruised, no?
I’m still trying to focus on those short horizons, carrying my pack not for the entirety of my life but rather for this one day. This one fine day in late April, when I am so glad I am not out in the insane world I hear about too frequently.
Blessings to you all, my dear friends.
~ S.K. Orr
6 Comments
James
The world will always need Geezers my friend, puff your chest out and stand proud. My kids seem to think I turned Geezer when I hit 50. (There may be something to that.)
James
Good to hear that things are going fairly smoothly there S.K.
It is nice to get away from the insanity for a spell, but by all means get out into it just often enough to remind yourself why there is no place like home.
This reminds me that The Wizard of Oz used be on TV every year, I don’t remember the last time it was on.
admin
James, we used to watch The Wizard of Oz every year, just like we watched The Ten Commandments and all those other seasonal favorites. Those showings were THE BIG EVENT for a particular season, and they were literal touchstones. Now, with the advent of video and streaming and internet whatchamacallit, everything is flattened and meaningless. Like being able to fly to warmer climes if your little feetsies get cold in the wintertime. No more patiently waiting for a ritual, even a thin rite like an annual showing of a movie on television.
I think we would be in a better place if we were still required to get up off the couch, walk to the television set, and twist a knob to find a channel. One of three available channels. And don’t forget to squeeze the tinfoil on the ends of the rabbit ears while standing on one foot.
Ach…I have become The Compleat Geezer.
James
The world needs Geezers to keep the kids in line.
I’m convinced my youngins saw me as a geezer when I was 40.
No rabbit ears at our place, we had one of those flashey areals mounted on the roof.
I do recall being dad’s makeshift remote control a few times. He piled green lumber by hand to air dry at a local mill. I didn’t know exactly what that meant at the time, but he sure looked beat when he got home so I really didn’t mind.
admin
James, I love that anecdote about being your dad’s remote control.
He stacked green lumber? Oh, man. He was a man worthy of respect. The hardest job, physically speaking, that I ever had, was at a lumberyard in East Texas. I was assigned to the stake chain, which was to gather these metal stakes that separated loads of raw wood, and to pile them onto a rack and bind them with those metal strips, and then let a forklift come haul them away. An entire day of lifting and binding metal stakes, over and over and over. I got home that night and went into a coma. I never went back. Yes, I lasted one day. And this was when I was still relatively young and had some muscles leftover from the Corps. Lumberyardsmen and coalminers have my undiluted respect.
James
All the jobs pop had, aside from a stint in the Army, were either in mills or the woods.
His birth certificate (Feb. 8th, 1910) showed Stevenson Washington as his place of birth because that was the closest town to the logging camp he was actually born in.
Overall he was one of the nicest guys you could hope to meet.
(But, I may be a tad biased there.)