Notes on being not so Dead

        After noon and you and Carol have been walking at the Pine Hill woods. You are in the car presently as Carol continues around the lakes. You have been thinking of how it is that you are presently in communication with two women who were a significant part of your early heart growth at Westerville Public Schools.

         I was thinking on this as I forgot to send my dance partner of the seventh/eighth grade two pictures I took of her at the reunion but did so this morning. A friend and I used to ride up to her house via his old Cushman motor scooter when we were twelve and thirteen. At the reunion she said we had won a trophy for our dancing – which must have been at the First Presbyterian Church basement. Both heart-throbs were most always there but I did not have a clue as to what my heart was saying other than I was attached to both in my childish boy-heart at the time. Most of high school was spent being a part of a group of boys (Doug, Fritz, and Steve), friends all. Well, some girls too, but just as friends.

         It is just amazing to me that I am now communicating with both – all three of us happily married – just friends.

         You misuse a word above, orndorff, ‘just’. You know better but politeness gets the better of you, as usual.

         You want me to be honest here, Amorella. Okay, I love my friends, but then I have to define love. Words and their meanings are never ending degrees of heart, soul and mind. So, friends are some sort of conjunction of arcs – I have an earth night sky and galaxy within. Do heart, soul and mind float about internally as moon and stars do externally? Is my soul my heavens? Are my nightly bright stars constellations of friends and family within those heavens? Is my mind my own sense of sun? And, is my heart my orbiting moon? Is that the gist of this analogy, Amorella?

         I don’t find myself thinking human beings are as special as all this universal analogy leads. In fact the analogy is a rather embarrassing ego on a stick. Well, then, as such I must conjure some truth in the thoughts, naked I am, more so than usual, hanging my emotional innards out to shrink and dry as some grand universe waiting patiently for the tiniest of black holes to center and suck such a choking stuffing down through a most arrogant and egotistical digestive system.

         In literary-like drama then I can proclaim myself Eliot’s Hollow Man waiting for a whimper to ‘scape through. How’s that for a stage, Amorella, to take the “just” out of friends and leave it alone with no word but secret intimate implication of something more, something left out, hidden clothing so to speak to hide the once youth of my heart which wished for more than the look of eyes or touching of hands. Once, yes, I had lovers of imaginary thought, but no lust that I can remember, or do not wish to remember.

         How do the Dead deal with such, Amorella? Are they deemed more honest than polite to old friends, young known? I can be passionate still but fingertips into letters and words is a better way of letting go, I swear.  Is each ghost of us as a common star among the grand galaxy of our species? I should better to like to think outside such a box as above. Once dead, we are not even dust. If so, I am ever thankful for having no more such thoughts and dream away eternity in pleasant sleep between the lines of any thought whatsoever.

         Seems I have struck a nerve with “just” orndorff. None the less, the passion shows through, naked as ever. Too bad, old man. I think the Dead cannot pay the piper more. – Amorella.

         You want to goad me more, but I will not have it. I am done with this spiritual blood-letting for the day.

         Good. All for now. The Dead in here deal with such secret self stuffings as you do here. Post, boy. And, let this be a lesson to you.  Amorella.


         The word "friends", I think, cannot be reasonably defined. I should have written ". . . married, and friends."