Notes - Christmas and the Dead / Intro of Dead-8

        You are lacking words so I will begin. Carol made a side salad, ham, mash potatoes and peas for Christmas lunch. You enjoyed it very much. No need for extras when you could have a second helping of three of your favorite foods served together.

         Lunch was very good; we hardly ever have this combination. I imagine we will have ice cream bars for dessert. It has been a lazy day. Earlier we took a local drive to see what was open, not much - two drug stores and a Chinese eat in/carry out. We used the car seat heaters for the forty some minutes about town. We love heated seats this time of year. It feels like the calm before a storm but I think it is supposed to hit the Dayton and Columbus area more than Cincinnati. Time will tell. The storm center says 3 to 6 inches but I say no more than 2. We'll see. Presently I am warm and full and rather indifferent to the Living and the Dead. Perhaps an interest (curiosity) will arise later. Tomorrow we may venture to a story looking to sell artificial Christmas trees with built in lights. Some have them in their living room window bare but for the bright little lights, still they look appropriate. If the grandkids were here we would have set things for display.

         Added excitement Carol just found a photograph she has been looking for, an 'official' picture of her father with Henry Cabot Lodge, Ladybird and LBJ. Very cool. There are a couple others she is still looking for, one with her dad and LBJ around that large oval table (Asian affairs), and another with Nixon. We are quite proud of her father and we have lots of pictures to go through for the whole family (generations on both sides from the forties through nineties). Time in our lives to gather these up for sharing with rest of famly as well as next generations. Someone will be interested in the genealogy, at least we hope so. We have some from Paul's family but they are mostly the last two generation and a few from Korea and back. It is my responsibility to see all is passed on, I promised Aunt Floy I would by carrying on with her work. Aunt Ernie (Uncle John's wife and Carol's Aunt) did a lot of work also. I am not sure who she left it to but I would like to make sure I have the Hammond side up to date. Aunt Ernie's work was interesting as she was French Protestant and traced her family back through the sixteenth century.

         Good day to dig through old photographs, boy. Post. Later, Amorella

          Bringing home the Dead for Christmas. Very cool. 

          I've heard of such stories through your memories. From Halloween to Christmas they room until home for the Holiday. Sound familiar?  - Amorella

          It does. No doubt I brought these up during Anglo-Saxon and Medieval literature. I had forgotten . I had a really good time during my lectures. I hope my students did too. I loved to through out things most of them did not know and would not if I didn't sprinkle such stories in with the literature. I have to thank Dr. Hancock for that. He knew how to brighten history. 

         You and Carol dug through one box and part way through another viewing lots of photos of forgotten memories. You both had a good time as most of the memories are shared.

         I have a shoebox for special family photos to eventually scan to place in the Reunion software. One point about that old Celtic story of the Dead roaming until a Christmas reunion at the dinner table I do not get; some have never left. Just this morning I was looking out the front window towards the leafless trees and I saw my father's face flash within the space of several branches. Just long enough for me to recognize who it was. It was not a ghost but the particular shapes and lights and darks jarred a memory of my father, so that's who I saw. The jump was from the unconscious or subconscious to the conscious mind. The point, Dad was being thought about even though I did not know it consciously. When the human mind can play tricks like this what need is there of a real ghost? (2101)

         Why don't we begin Dead-8 right here, right now? Merlyn has Vivian heavy in his heart. You know how it is to be thinking of someone you love who is not nearby. Nearly everyone has had such feelings, some can be quite powerful emotionally because the 'attachment' feels so close in the heart while so faraway in the mind. This is Merlyn's setting as he sit in his small leather boat, the curragh near the west embankment of the river. - Amorella

The Dead - 8

            Trees and shrubs line both sides of this river, a river not so much deep as wide while at the same time a river not so much wide as deep. This so I Merlyn think. It depends on the angle of my view and the width of my mind. The narrower the view is the deeper the water. When my heart feels Vivian within; another heartansoulanmind relaxing peacefully asleep in my heart, then the deeper I can sink into her own. There is a magnetic-like spiritual energy that is drawn into us. The mind becomes one eye and the heart the other. As two eyes add the depth of perception the mind eye and the heart eye also adds a perception, a reality from which love is but an echo to the actual reality.

            This one actual reality hangs in another setting more dressed by a rarefied intuitive perception that has little imaginary dressing. This begotten energy is a passion that has no muscle memory of sexual politics dancing in unwinding toy spools of unaddressed innuendos. Contentment is being nothing and all. Nothing and all is no more the depth of this water and width of this river on which I rest in a small boat of my own making. Such is the contentment in the twinning of our like souls; whose single ring would shame the size of Saturn, that I wait to see whose soul next we two, Vivian and I do touch. We are bound in the cosmos of HeavenOrHellBothOrNeither and HeavenOrHellBothOrNeither is bound within the cosmos of the spiritual we. 

264 words

**

         2205 hours. I am not sure that I am here or there, but I do catch the drift of how it is for Merlyn and Vivian to be as they are when both see the fit together. Not that much different than love with spouse or lover in memory or no -- it is better nothing be remembered when in such togetherness than nothing be remembered at all.

         Don't get carried away with romantic imagination boy, there is no such thing in Merlyn's present lines, that is the point. Post. - Amorella

         Thank you for leading into such a setting, Amorella. It took me a while to follow into your lead. (2210)