A walk in the cemetery, then a Subway picnic on the west bank of the Little Miami at Rae Park. A pleasant drive home via Columbia. Carol is working in the yard, you opened the windows downstairs after shutting off the furnace—fresh air feels and smells good – even perked up the cat since the sun went away about half an hour ago. More clouds and more rain coming tonight and tomorrow.
You are feeling self-conscious about placing your email account on the blog, however, you are reminded of when no one saw your writing, when you realized you need to have at least a potential audience for someone to tell you when you have so far slipped into the story that you are not sure how to return to the shared reality of your earthly cousins.
Not forgotten, Amorella. It is better to understand the world with human company than not. No doubt that fact had some bearing on having the Dead being a commune of sorts.
This brings up the one other major incident that affected/effected you while growing up in Westerville. This one is heart related on the scale of heartansoulanmind as a unit. You are waiting as you have no clue. Nothing comes to mind.
True, Amorella. Something just did. Watching the young woman, a teenager, die from drowning at Glengarry Pool, though it was not technically in Westerville and I was in upper elementary school at the time. The lifeguards had pulled her onto the walkway surrounding the pool. She was on a towel on her stomach with her forehead resting on her right forearm. I saw her look up and open her eyes one last time and she was looking our way; towards us small group of boys. She shut her eyes and did not open them again. If she could focus we were the last people she ever saw. It was quite odd to think on that. We boys whispered such things and left soon after. That was the first time I ever witnessed someone dying.
No, that wasn’t in Westerville. And, it just flashed in your mind. You have it right this time. Go ahead and copy what you have written from an earlier time.
This was in the 19 August 2009 posting:
“. . . Richard shook hands with a neighbor of his grandparents, a Mr. Press Reynolds, who also on West Walnut Street in Westerville, Ohio. The story is that when Mr. Reynolds was a boy on the plantation he operated a tobacco press, thus he took it for his first name. Supposedly it was a Reynolds’ plantation so he took Reynolds as his last name. Richard remembers Mr. Reynolds as a kindly old fellow with a workingman’s hands. What does it mean to have shaken hands with a man who had been born and early raised as a slave orndorff?
It was an important event in my life at the time. I was five, if I remember correctly. Too be honest, I don’t remember my thoughts at the meeting other than my grandfather and I were standing on an old side porch and Mr. Reynolds was standing on the porch with the screen door open. The house paint of the small one story house was blue I think. Almost directly across from the house stood, and still stands, the war memorial in the Otterbein College cemetery. Mr. Reynolds was like one of those granite stones that lined north to south across that cemetery. As I grew up I learned more about slavery as a matter of course. I mainly remember the event because I thought that here was a man who had witnessed the Civil War. That the war had not been that long a time before, since I could shake his hand in the present, which would have been 1947.
I had shaken hands with history. At five I had not thought much about that before, but I had an early understanding of it, because of the cemetery where as a child I toyed with my imagination while walking, running, or sitting among those stones. I understood the last names of some of those people on the stones because I had already met some of their living children or grandchildren. The concept of generations was something inherently important to me, and still is. The human generations is something I want to remember when I am dead and partially buried in that same cemetery. That is, if one consciously survives death. I think it is entirely possible because the human spirit and mind are very powerful and if anything can survive death they just might. If there is nothing after death, that’s all right too. Whatever is the natural inclination of the spirit and mind has something to do with it. Perhaps we inwardly fear death enough that we just survive it. That would be funny. If G---D exists, I feel SheanHe has a sense of humor. The universe is full of little jokes, at least to me it is.
Strangely enough, I awoke in the middle of the night [the 19th] with a flash of memory of old Mr. Reynolds’ face. He had brightness within his tired eyes, short gray curly hair, and a warm, kind smile for a little one like me. “
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So, there you have it, boy. The Westerville mind: the Boy Scout oath/law and Apostle’s Creed; the Westerville soul: being play soldier tortured; and the Westerville heart: meeting and shaking hands with old Mr. Press Reynolds. They’ll be with you through your dying day, boy. How’s that?
I assume there is a kind of equality in terms of these events affect/effect on my life. I would not have thought or realized this. It is interesting to think on how you measured these ‘impacts’ on my life, as I do not see these incidents as fiction in any way. How can matters of the heartansoulanmind be measured, even in a fiction how can this be done?
Gives you something to consider, old man. Post. – Amorella.
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You were watching the nightly news on NBC with Brian Williams and saw the many photos of tornados and destruction in the South yesterday. You were surprised to feel the nerve reactions to the scenes as you and Carol were personal witnesses to the F5 Sayler Park tornado in 1974. You watched it a few blocks west of the main Cincinnati library as it drove northwest towards I-75. It is the largest you ever witnessed. The sirens were on from four-thirty in the afternoon until about three o’clock the next morning. You were living in a Montgomery Road apartment in south Silverton area at the time (about three miles south of Kenwood). This same tornado leveled a major grocery store about five hundred yards from where you now live in Mason. Below is from Steve Horstmeyer's site.
"Sayler Park Tornado - April 3, 1974
The only tornado of 148 in the April 3-4, 1974 Super Outbreak to occur in 3 states
It touched down near Rising Sun, IN, moved to the NE, crossing Boone County, KY, then the Ohio River
into Ohio at Sayler Park.
The Sayler Park tornado was the most photographed of all the 148 in the Super Outbreak and Professor
T. Fujita of the University of Chicago used home movies (remember this is before the advent of home video
systems) and determined that the UPWARD wind velocities exceeded 160 mph while the HORIZONTAL wind
velocities reached 178 mph.
Fujita-Pearson Scale - F5
Path Length - on the ground 21 miles for 23 minutes
Average Speed - 54.8 mph
First Touch Down 5:28 PM - Lift-Off 5:51 PM
Note: I [Steve H.] witnessed this tornado from an overpass on I-275 between Milford, OH and Loveland, OH. The funnel at cloud base never dissipated even after the "rope stage". It touched down again briefly in Montgomery, OH, then in the Mason, OH area. This is listed as tornadoes 43, 44 and 45 of the Super Outbreak of 1974."
The above material is taken from www.shorstmeyer.com/tornadoes/1974.html
Steve Horstmeyer is still a meteorologist covering the Cincinnati area.
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I am continually surprised at how this storm has effected us over the years. The sirens go off and Carol and I are in the basement, no questions asked. Never will we forget that night. – rho
One of several life changing events. In this case the change was psychological. You have tremendous respect for the power of nature. Everyone has life changing events, some are not consciously remembered and in some cases they are partially imaginary. The world is full of such people. You asked how can such things be measured on a heartansoulanmind scale. You ask the wrong question. All for tonight. Post. – Amorella.
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