Notes - HeavenOrHellBothOrNeither

         Early Sunday afternoon. Picked up Carol’s humorous Valentine cards and some Cadbury candies to go with them. She wants to go for a walk, so why not go, boy, you have your faults and one of them is downright physical laziness. At least you didn’t grumble when she suggested it.

         It is in the fifties, a very pleasant day. I haven’t even had lunch yet.

         You didn’t eat breakfast until after nine. The cat just climbed off the staircase onto your right shoulder and across to lay her front paws and head on your left shoulder and arm. Leaned her body up slightly to let you know she wanted a belly rub, (and swatted your right ear with her upright tail) which you gave her. Carol said she would be ready to walk after finishing an article in the paper. Later, dude. – Amorella.

         Moving on twenty-two hundred hours. You spent a little time prepping for scene four as you recovered thoughts, etc. you were going to use, that were waylaid in the transfer to the Air, plus you eight gig flash drive physically broke down and you spent time recovering what was on the drive and putting it on you large external hard drive. Another problem: your old forty gig external drive needs a firewire port so you will have to buy an adapter to use it on this machine.

         Earlier, you did take your walk in Rose Hill Cemetery fitting  a pace for one half mile at a time. Your favorite sitting (resting) place is a bench at which you can see the headstone of one of your former Mason students who died far too young. Miss G. provides a reflection, a conscious connection you sorely need from time to time.

         I would like to imagine Katie Girton is the only one, but from what I remember more than ten of my former students are dead. One still owes me a paper on Milton’s Paradise Lost. It was at least a week late when he lost his life.

         You remember telling him that he might not pass [the course] if he did not turn in the paper. You feel bad because he passed anyway. You gave him a passing grade. I am mentioning this because you will not because you do not remember, though to you it was something like this. Too many details to remember but not too little to forget. – Amorella.

         It might be partly fiction, Amorella. Cancer, auto accidents, infections, suicides, I cannot remember what else. It is/was all sad. The deaths are not a fiction. A few flash through my mind, the circumstances, the surprise and oncoming shock as many of these deaths were out of the blue, so to speak, completely unexpected – like seeing someone’s name in the obituary column in the paper and saying to yourself, “I just saw him last week.” No premonition, nothing that would make one suspect sheorhe would not exist on the next Sunday. A lifetime of teaching affords such recollections. Good people, people better than myself, and with far more potential. It all comes down to physics and bio-physics. Death comes with the territory, nothing more, nothing less.

         This sets you in a despondent mood?

         No. As long as one is alive, sheorhe moves in the world. One survives until one doesn’t. It is always sadder for one younger though. Somewhere inside the heart doesn’t completely forget.

         There are good reasons for that, boy. The soul does not either, though the mind may wish to. That’s the reason I call the place of the Dead ‘HeavenOrHellBothOrNeither’. It is a more realistic description as far as the books are concerned. No escape from who one is, boy. The characters in books four and five better understand this in book six, and so will you if you ever complete them. All for tonight. – Amorella.