This afternoon I had a pleasant conversation with a dear friend that lasted over an hour. I am not a chatty guy, but I must be a good listener. During this talk she guilted me into going to a memorial service for a Lion friends sister. After some mind wrestling I decided I will get an atta-boy if I go. Nothing beats an atta-boy. Although one awe-shit erases ten atta-boys. That is why I felt it critical to go to this service. I am sorely in need of atta-boys.
I raced through supper, took a shower, shaved, and dressed for a memorial service, only to find a text saying the service is on August 20 not July 20, grrrr!. So here I sit all dressed up and clean wondering how to save the evening. Guys at my age don’t have black books that can lead to a memorable night. In fact, I haven’t had a black book in sixty-five years. I don’t think it would be of any use if I still had it.
During our conversation we discussed my lack of contact of late. It seems my friends are wondering why I don’t return texts and phone calls. I’ve been wondering about that myself. In the shower it came to me, it is grief. Grief is a strange emotion and it strikes at strange times in strange ways. I was thinking it was depression, but grief is a better explanation. The only way out is to deal with it, which is why I finally consented to go to the wake.
I will take the car out for a drive and watch the sunset, maybe that will compensate. I am truly suffering sexual grief which is what happens when a partner loses a longtime loving bedmate. No one ever talks about it though, they just trudge on through. I on the other hand, having diagnosed my problem, like to discuss it, except no one wants to listen.
So driving off to the sunset is my cure. It’ll give me a chance too think clearly about my next move in life.
A week ago I posted a piece titled Dreams. In order to enhance the piece I added some photos from my collection of family pictures. I found two pictures that I was looking for for years. I remembered these shots very clearly. I accidentally found them on that day. What this did was to open a brain lobe to memories from long ago. The photo of the beautiful young lady posing with the VW bug is burned into my memory forever. The day I took this photo was October 15, 1961. I remember because the photo was of my two first loves. My wife Barbara, and my first car. October 15 is one day after Barb and I got married. The place was on the Lake Michigan shoreline near the Adler Planetarium. One could say this was the first page of the first chapter of our love story.
Sunday morning a summer storm raced through Frankfort. At five a.m. I rolled out of bed to make pit stop, and the morning sky was bright blue with July sunshine. I jumped back in bed and was sleeping soundly for the second time when thunder and lightening woke me up at eight-thirty. The day was dark and stayed dark all morning and into the early afternoon. The storm did not be finish until late afternoon. It is the kind of day that Barb and I would have said let’s just spend the day in bed lolling around. Often on days like this we did just that, with one exception lolling evolved into loving, and loving took us back into deep sleep. My how a person can dig up these memories from so long ago, in this case it has been fifty-nine years. In my mind I long to return to those days, but my body tells me no, don’t even try. Number-one I don’t have a partner any more, and number-two my libido has all but disappeared, and three, if I did have a drop of libido left it wouldn’t be enough to make the magic happen.
Between the gloomy day, and finding those old pictures I started looking at photos from days gone by. Like when my kids were little, and then their wedding pictures and all the way up to the birth of their kids. I finally began slowing down taking pictures when the grandkids were in college.
I have seven natural grand children and three step grand children from Peggy. Of the seven one is now a pharmacist, her sister is a nurse their brother is a junior at Texas A&M University studying Astro Engineering. My Daughter’s son is a chef, his sister is a junior in high school, and my oldest son’s oldest son is a junior in high school, his young brother is just starting high school. Ding Dong! The door bell rings, and my daughter arrives with her husband. This post stops.
Now it is Monday, and I have lost the thread of thinking that started this post. It had something to do with old pictures, but I lost the direction I was headed in. Right now I must change the theme and wake up another brain cell to complete this story. All I can conjure is that after finding two old pictures on a very gloomy stormy day I spent an hour looking through my file of 26,000 digital photos to open many old memories. The day went by fast.
I think I was headed in the direction of how time flies, and reviewing old photos reminds us of that time. I often remark to my friends how quickly the days pass, and then remind myself that when the days begin to drag my clock spring may be wearing out. Eventually, the days will drag to the point of making life unbearable. Since Peggy died my days seem longer, and I believe that dragging time in my life is nearing, I can tell.
Have you ever hired a lawyer to represent you with the idea that you will lose? If you have you are not normal. We hire lawyers to win. We want to stay out of jail, we want to get the judgement in our favor, but we never hire him to lose. Yet, half of all people who hire lawyers lose, and the other half wins. Very seldom is there a compromise settlement. Settlements appear when a lawyer who is clearly losing his case argues for a compromise which in his mind is a win for you, as in ten years in jail versus life in prison.
Lawyers are trained to win. They learn to debate whether their client is on the wrong side or not. They argue in your behalf even when they know you are guilty as sin. Even though we know this we continue to hire lawyers to represent us in government. Hiring of course is our vote. We argue that lawyers know the law therefore they must be in charge of writing new ones and upholding the existing ones. We also know that there is always the conflict between good and evil, black and white, north vs south. From the very beginning our government has evolved into two factions based on political ideology, liberal, and conservative. Most of the people who wrote our constitution and the Declaration of Independence were trained in law.
Note: The shape of Illinois is Wisconsin.
In the beginning of our country, before we were a nation we were ruled by a single person called king. It was his way or the highway. Needless to say that many of the people who lived in North America at the time of our revolution still pledged allegiance to the king and probably continued that allegiance after the separation from England.
I am not knowledgeable in history well enough to say for certain that some of our new members of congress may have still carried some allegiance to the king. For the sake of argument I venture to guess that some did. What these people did was to poison the congress with opposing ideas and attitudes. The result was an evolution towards the two ideologies which dominate out political system to this day. We have settled on two ideologies one liberal (Democrat) and one conservative (Republican). As I stated above they were trained in law, and in debate and in winning.
In the beginning there was more legitimate compromise between groups. Our system seemed to be working, but somewhere along the way (About early 1900) a new faction began introducing radical ideas. The faction was a split from the democrats and proposed ideas and laws that imposed far more conflict than the normal average democrats. They liked to call themselves progressives.
At about the same time that Woodrow Wilson was promoting progressivism in America Carl Marx was pushing communism in Europe. Marx had a student named Lenin, and these two were not content to allow their ideas to evolve slowly into the hearts and minds of the people. Instead they introduced them with revolution, convert or die. We in America had a hint of what was coming with the progressive movement, but we didn’t believe in introducing it aggressively with revolution. We were content to allow the communists in America to promote their foul ideas under their First Amendment rights to free speech. Gradually, these communist voices grew and infiltrated organizations throughout America. Most notably they overtook our institutions of learning. With young minds within their command they have been able to poison the minds of our youth with ideas of revolution and communism.
Most of these revolutionaries are democrat and they have begun spreading their leftist ideas into government. Combine the concept of electing lawyers as our Representatives and Senators along with their leftist mindset received from college we have a system that is causing internal conflict and rioting in the streets all in the name of destroying America.
Add into this mix a group of very, very rich people like George Soros, and liberal think tanks who fund hundreds of very democratic sounding organizations that are in the business of fomenting radical change. Black Lives Matter, and ANTIFA are two that come to mind. These groups are basically communist in their ideology, but have been named to sound like something else. For instance Black Lives Matter does not do anything to effect change in the black neighborhoods where hundreds of black people are being shot and killed weekly by other black people. Why do they instead concentrate on blacks who have been killed by white police? Because it makes for better TV and that spreads the message of their revolution faster and further than saving black lives in the black community.
The newest movement is the one to defund police departments. This one is so crazy radical that it is hard to believe these people have brains. Yet, there is at least one city where they have begun to dismantle the police department to make them into something more “touchy-feely and please don’t steal, riot, or kill people it is not nice” kind of force. While the criminal will continue to use weapons without flinching, cause blood to flow, and the new cops will have to hold the perp by the hand until a highly paid psychologist arrives on the scene to talk the criminal down.
In conclusion, all I want to point out is that the reason we have all of these problems in America today is because we elect too many lawyers into office. They don’t know how to lose or to compromise a real solution that makes both sides happy. They are trained to WIN not to SOLVE problems.
My pillow wrestled with me all night long while I dreamt sad dreams. I couldn’t believe the sadness that overwhelmed me even though I was in a deep sleep. The dream was about my former place of employment. Mind you, I retired in 2001 and yet I dreamed about the dismantling of the manufacturing plant where I spent a huge part of my life.
There was a lot of confusion that didn’t make sense as in most dreams, but the theme dealt with ending the life of a very successful manufacturing plant that began in the 1950’s and continued producing until sometime in the 2010’s. The product line consisted of two items in various sizes. One was a plastic duct for routing wire, and the second was a plastic tie to bind loose wires together. These products evolved into a catalogue of the same in various material, colors, lengths, and accessories to enhance the finished product of electricians who used them in their work. As most successful companies do, ours grew. By the time I left the company our product line was merely a section in a large catalog and a department within a larger division. The products still have life, but no longer merit the attention they once did. They still produce profit and therefore they continue to live, but at the sign of a decline the business will change the model and eventually they will be sold or dropped.
Throughout his life the owner re-invested his profits to make more stuff. Out first plant (the one in my dream) became one of eight around the world. Eventually, the product I spent my life designing, improving, and making became a Division. Each of the manufacturing plants had their own product specialties, and they also grew. Of the seven domestic plants in the towns of Tinley Park, New Lenox, Romeoville, Cummings, Burr Ridge, Lockport, and Orland Park four have been moved to foreign countries. Three of the plants were sold and repurposed by the new owners. Only one, the one I toiled in, is gone from the face of the earth, and now I am having dreams about it.
I don’t miss being there anymore, and I am forgetting the names of the people with whom I worked, but I still recognize their faces although with an extra twenty years on them it takes a few seconds to register who they are. Why my brain decided to play this movie about the dismantling of the Tinley Park plant makes no sense to me. The second thing that makes no sense is the feeling of sadness that overwhelmed me. Maybe it is because four of my former bosses have passed as well as the owner, and their souls were uneasy last night. What did I do to poke my mind into this confusing whirlwind of disconnected stuff being removed, sold, destroyed, or sent someplace else?
All day, I’ve been feeling down because of this dream. Maybe it was because I took a bike ride yesterday instead of a walk. My entire body might have gone into automatic as it did for the many years that I commuted by bicycle to the office. I didn’t drink anything unusual, nor did I over eat. I will never solve this mystery and once this post is online I will put the whole affair to bed.
I enjoyed the fire fly display the night before much better.
