Category: childhood

Tuesday’s Theme Music

Inspiring sunshine scored the morning clouds, lighting the valley and the house’s eastern face. I put my face to it and breathed in cold, fresh air, admiring birds, squirrels, and chip monks as they took up business.

This was 7:30 AM, just after Tuesday’s sunrise at 7:12 on this 27th of September, 2022, in the Common Era. Umbrellas are called for this day as clouds have taken over and rain scents pepper the air. 55 F now, they tell us not to expect anything over 60 today. Yet I’m in shorts. Wear jeans, back to shorts today. Not like they’re glued or stapled to me. I can always swap my shorts for pants before sunset at 7:09 PM, if needed.

Mom had a rough morning. So did her partner, and my sisters, and me. That’s how it rolls. Diarrhea caused as a side effect of her antibiotics debilitated her. That all happened before 6 AM. She was to see her cardiologist but he went out sick. They still wanted Mom to come in and see the cardiologist’s nurse, but she convinced them that she was too weak, and the appointment was cancelled. They’ll reschedule after the cardiologist returns. A health care nurse is coming by at 2 to check on her, per a schedule set up yesterday.

My younger sisters vent a lot to me. This has impacted them, along with their children. All regularly visit Mom as they live in the area. I act psychologist to them, listening without giving advice. Seems to help.

Their thoughts about change and mortality prompted The Neurons to pull up a favorite song of mine. “Breathe (In the Air)” by Pink Floyd was part of the monumental album, “The Dark Side of the Moon”, released in 1972. I saw the group perform the album in concert. It felt like a transcendental experience. I’ve since seen them in concert several more times. I originally had the album on 8 track, then got it on cassette tape, vinyl, and finally, a digitally remastered CD. Yes, I like the album.

As the song says,

Run, rabbit, run
Dig that hole, forget the sun
And when at last the work is done
Don’t sit down, it’s time to dig another one

h/t to genuis.com

So life seems to be for so many, dig a hole, and then dig another, metaphors for work, work, work, work, work.

Hope you enjoy it. Stay positive, test negative, take care of yourselves and others. I’ve had coffee, thanks. I am ready for lunch and will have leftover chicken tortellini soup which my sister made and brought over yesterday. There’s plenty, if you care to have some.

Cheers

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Wednesday’s Theme Music

Sunshine slanted across the flat valley at 7:17 AM in Pittsburgh before clouds bullied it into disappearing.

Hi, fellow sentients. Today is Wednesday, September 21, 2022. September is going apace. Seems like another day comes up about every twenty-four hours. Viewing hours for daylight will end today at 7:30 in the PM. 63 F is the moment’s temperature under serious clouds. Drumroll as we open the envelope and read the omniscient they’s projected high: 28 C.

The groundhog has emerged for breakfast in the backyard. I enjoy watching him traverse and search, imagining his personality and voice from his waddle, pauses, and gazes. Really looks like he might be a retired British major. He likes a peaceful, easy way, and prefers the solitude of his own voice.

Mom is doing better, thanks. Was moved last night from hospital a nursing home to begin rehab therapy. Voice, spirit, attitude have all improved. She’s cleared of COVID, fluid gone from lungs and heart, pacemaker and heart are both stronger, her appendix healed, and infections are vanquished. She remains on anti-biotics while she gains mass back, but she’s off the blood thinner. Thanks for your support, it is appreciated. Going up to see her in a while.

On my end, I removed my Ziopatch from my chest this morning and I’m mailing that back today. Good to have it off my chest.

The Neurons are wild with music this morning. Huey Lewis and the News, Metallica, Bush, Tony! Toni! Toné!, The Climax Blues Band, and others. I finally settled on “She’s Just My Style” from 1965. I couldn’t recall who had it as a hit and did the google thing to bring back Gary Lewis & the Playboys. I always like this song’s vocals, and that brief guitar solo. I was nine when it came out but its words were easily heard and understood. I always enjoyed the small vocal flourishes it incorporated. It’s another one of those songs from basement adventures where we pretended to be famous performers.

Got some Peet’s Major Dickason on deck. Stay positive and test negative. The alternative sucks. I speak from my own experience; yours will be different. Here’s the music. Cheers

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Tuesday’s Theme Music

Center stage was the sun’s at 7:05 AM in Pittsburgh, and she used it to full, rousing effect.

Today is called September 20, 2022. I awoke thinking about dreams and then shifted to news, feeling concerns about all the storms hitting. Japan. Alaska. Puerto Rico. How are things there? Is help on the way. Politics are a little suspended as I wait for pieces of information to be released, and wait for mid-terms. Wait. Read. Listen. Think. Wait.

I feel like I’m on a low boil here in PA as the stout sunshine finds my skin. 19 C again, high of 77 F expected before the sun’s curtain falls at 7:21 PM. Clouds lurk and plot, meeting and muttering with one another, but the sun owns the stage in my zone.

Since it’s Tuesday, The Neurons have planted “Tuesday’s Gone” by Lynyrd Skynyrd in the morning mental music stream. First heard it when it was released in 1973 and I was a high school junior at Shady Spring High School. The song strikes deep chords in me, sealing another longing fit for what was and what never came to be. ‘Tis always been that way.

So, you know, have some coffee and enjoy Tuesday before it’s gone. Stay pos, test neg. Cheers

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The Reminiscent Drive

He cruised old familiars. This is where he lived from sixth to nine grade – only four years? But that was in child years when time stretched for him. Aging math is often astonishing. In this case, fifty-one ellipses around the sun were done since he’d last lived in the red brick ranch house with the single car garage. It was a laughingly small place to the mind of these times but had worked for a family of two adults and five children. Yes, bedrooms were shared. One bathroom provided service for all. But there was also the basement, converted into a laundry room and family room. That gave a little more space.

Seeing streets and houses, he plugged in who lived where, wondering where each now lived, or if they lived. Oddly, houses remained almost identical to what lived in memory. It felt the same. If cars weren’t parked in the driveway, it could be the same year that he last lived there; no other differences marked the elapsed time. Temptation seeped in to park and walk up to a door, knock, see if a friend was available. “Hi, is Curt home?” Or Bruce. Rick. John. Chuck. Their remembered faces light up like a game in his mind.

Then he notices that the large old oak where he and Vicky first kissed was gone. With that seen, he knew, time to drive away. Home was somewhere else.

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Tuesday’s Wandering Thought

His four sisters all call their mother ‘mummy’. Not mommy, but mummy. They have done so their entire lives. He calls her mom.

He wonders what drives the difference. His sisters’ children call his sisters mom, mommy, or mother. Their grandchildren call his sisters grandma. None of them refer to their moms as mummy.

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Tuesday’s Theme Music

It’ll be 103 F today, so we have that to look forward to. Everything is relative, so it could be worse. Fire might be consuming us, flooding drowning us, or hurricanes and cyclones could be blowing us away. A roulette wheel of disasters is possible.

The sun, though, never intimates these things. Rising at 6:41 this morning, the sunshine provided a sweet sight in the cool morning. Bathing the forested hills and pines with gentle light, illuminating a Technicolor blue sky, it seemed like the world was close to perfect. Perhaps, for that period, in that slice of valley, it was.

It’s 83 F now, getting hot fast. Haze now scuffs the sky. We still have workable breathing air — 62 on the scale, yellow and moderate — as shifting winds and high pressures protect us from wildfire smoke. Idaho is blazing away to the northeast. Several California infernos are drawing news and attention. The three that generally plague us, Mill Creek, McKinney, and Rum Creek, are all within seventy-five miles, are burning but containment is growing on them. Fingers crossed. When I mentioned this on FB and note that I’m safe, my siblings and their hubbies urge me to move east to where they reside.

This is Tuesday, September 6, 2022. Sunset will be at 7:36 this evening.

The Neurons dug into the mind section dedicated to when I was a thirteen-year-old living in Pittsburgh, Pa, in 1969. One of the songs dominating the air that summer was “Hot Fun in the Summertime”, a groovy, funky piece of rock by Sly and the Family Stone. Hope you find some enjoyment in it. Came to me as I was walking the hills as the land cooled down just before sunset yesterday.

Stay positive and test negative. I’ve had coffee but another cup is calling. Who am I to deny that coffee the pleasure of satisfying my tastebuds and stimulating my brain? Not I, sir. Not I.

Here’s the tune. Cheers

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Labor Day’s Theme Music

Monday, September 5 of 2022 dropped in for a visit. I asked her how she was. She answered, “I’m on holiday.”

Yes, it be Labor Day in the U.S., the culmination of a three-day weekend. Many turn it into a four-day weekend by asking for Friday off.

Beautiful morning here. 17 C after a clear, languid sunrise at 6:40 AM today. AQI says our air is green, 17. Purple Air makes us green and 2. A high of 93 F is on the menu for today. They tell me sunset will come at 7:38 this evening. Who am I to argue with them about that?

The Neurons are celebrating Labor Day with “Waitin’ for the Bus”, a 1973 song by ZZ Top. It has an urban blues feel to it which I’ve always enjoyed. Used to listen to it in high school art class, as our teacher invited us to bring in music.

Hope your Monday is the best it can be for you. Stay posi, test negy. I’m getting ready to coffee up. Here’s the tune. Cheers

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Mewsday’s Wandering Thought

His wife needed new shoelaces. Only one store in town sells replacement laces.

He realized that finding shouldn’t surprise him. When he was a child, it was commonplace to snap a shoelace, forcing imaginative knotting to keep your shoe tied. In these times, the shoes usually wore out before the laces. His wife’s laces were for new shoes; she wanted white laces instead of the stripped ones that came with her shoes. Yes, it is a little first world pain, isn’t it?

No, the store didn’t have the laces she needed.

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Sunday’s Theme Music

It’s about 17 C outside. Minute haze dulls the blue sky’s purity. My wife looks out and says, “I wish it would stay like this for a month.” Welcome to Sunday, August 28, 2022.

It won’t stay like this today. 90 F is expected as a high. The sun showed up this AM at 6:32 and will vacate our sky at 7:52 tonight as the length of daylight continues shrinking. I do miss the ocean and beach where we spent last week. Oh, that lovely air, and the glory of hearing the ocean and watching waves hurry in and crash and then drift away. We had no sinus issues there, whereas we began experiencing sinus blockages and postnasal drip when we were still a hundred miles from home. Today brings me full stoppage and the need to blow a few times.

The Neurons are feeding Echosmith and “Cool Kids” (2013) into the morning mental music stream. I don’t know the course that brought the song in. I suspect it emerged from a spectrum of thoughts and slivers of quicksilver dreams at once reflective and amusing. I was a cool kid. Just sayin’, that’s how I was often described. When I pressed why that was used to describe me, people said, as the song says, that I seemed to get it. Yet, I had issues, loads of family matters, though not as heavy as many endure. At least I had shelter and food security. Nobody was abusing me.

Of course, I sang a slighter different version as I pet my orange buddy, the little ginger bear known as Papi. I sang, “I wish that I could be like the cool cats because all of the cool cats get all the kibble.” Papi was too cool to respond beyond disdain. It’s his standard M.O.

The coffee has landed. Stay positive, test negative, and so on. Dream your dream and pursue your hopes. Here’s the music. Cheers

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Saturday’s Theme Music

When they finally broke through to the other side and the dust cleared, they found a material world with many boulevards of broken dreams. No matter; it was Saturday, August 27, 2022. They had that going for them, if nothing else.

It’s overcast in my swath of the world. Though the day advanced with the sun cresting the eastern mountains at 6:31 AM, the sun’s warmth is remote and oblique. 18 C now, we expect 83 F to be the temperature’s peak. Night will take over at 7:53 this evening, when the sun ‘moves on’ as the world turns.

For music, The Neurons are plying the morning mental music stream with a song from Peter Gabriel. Named “Blood of Eden”, you might expect it to be an energetic, uplifting, hard rocker. Surprisingly, it’s not. (Yes, you correctly detected snark. Good for you. You must have already had coffee.) I’ve always been a Peter Gabiel fan. This 1983 song was another one which prompted me to listen carefully as my brain asked, “Wait, what’s he saying?” The Neurons restored the song to active presence in my mind after overhearing an older man and woman chatting over coffee. He said in response to her reply, “She said that she can’t afford the insurance.” And while my brain remained engaged on its task, The Neurons took up that line and hooked it up with the “Blood of Eden” lyric, “I cannot get insurance anymore. They don’t take credit, only gold.” That’s just how The Neurons play.

My coffee is at hand. I wasn’t always a coffee drinker. Didn’t start that until around fifth, sixth grade, while visiting a friend’s house. We had the same first name, Michael, although he was a Mike. People habitually said, here’s Michael and Mike, or M and M. Mike used to have coffee with a lot of sugar and cream. I only drank it this way a few times, always at his house. When our compasses took us in different directions, I quit drinking coffee and didn’t resume until I was twenty and in the military. Even then, I was only an occasional imbiber of the black brew, usually on midnight shifts. I became a regular drinker when I went off shifts and became the Training NCO. My boss would come in each morning and say, “Let’s go get coffee.” That’s where the habit really developed for me. That was at Kadena on Okinawa, after I’d been there a few years, so I was twenty-seven. My relationship with coffee blossomed. By the time I reached Germany a few years later, I was identified as a hard-core coffee drinker.

BTW, the coffee was bought at an Army & Air Force Exchange Services cafeteria upstairs from the command post where I worked. It cost ninety cents.

Stay positive and test negative. Take care of your family, community, tribe, and self. Here’s the music. Cheers

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