Notes - not in your lifetime /

          You are at Pine Hill and have completed your leg of the walk. Carol is working on hers. Beautiful Saturday morning, slightly crisp, a reminder what season is coming up. You think Autumn but for many it is football season. You watched the news and the commercials stick out (Bob won’t be missing much, you thought). Commercials evoke an image you don’t really share. The haunting is from the Willy Loman character in Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Fiction turned your corner long ago. This is but one example of the fiction in your life, boy. Some of it has been real enough even if you never saw a live production. – Lots of runners out, mostly young women in pairs; you smile and think, young mature women, one of nature’s delights. Older ones too as far as that goes. Men would not get far without a woman in the equation, that’s your feeling.With this I wholeheartedly agree. – Amorella.

         A stop at Kroger’s for milk and bananas and dropping off four Kroger bags jammed full of Kroger bags for recycling, a periodic chore never mentioned.

         Then why mention it, Amorella?

         Because it is a reality, old man. Some of what you do everyday is real whether you think so or not. One day it won’t be. You got that, boy. – Amorella.

         I hardly need reminding.

         Then why am I reminding you?

         Later in the afternoon. Lunch at Smash Burgers, then home. You have been working on the yard, some mowing last night and you are in the process of finishing the rest now that the house and trees are mostly shading what remains to be mowed. Watching the weather scenes at the Carolina beaches you are reminded of the hurricane you caught the edge of at Tampa, sixty to seventy mile winds, sustained in the high fifties, being pelted by beach sand and salt water droplets, foam whipped from the wave being driven down the beach like large piles of soapsuds, six to seven foot waves with the water coming almost up to the condo wall and it would have if it had not had a mound of sand full of sea oaks to stop the water’s progress. The level-three hurricane was out on the Gulf and eventually hit landfall in north Florida.

         The point was that I could relate to the videos, but I have never been in winds more than seventy-five miles an hour. In those winds I could not hear the person talking to me who was by my left side and she could not hear me. We were both surprised.

         We are going up to Pringle’s in Westerville on Monday morning and will see Bob for the last time around eleven. I am going to tell him that book four, if ever completed, will have a special dedication to him from me and Amorella.

         No need to change the direct objects, orndorff, in fact I insist on it. I rather enjoy having the last word. – Amorella.

         When has it ever been otherwise?

         It happens, boy, but not in your lifetime. Post and let this not so subtle message settle in your soul. – Amorella.