Notes - busy Sunday

         Bedtime. Another busy day and the driveways has piles of trash and recycle material awaiting an early morning pickup. You also dropped off more at Goodwill. Kim, Owen and Brennan headed home after lunch at Panera. Tonight after Carol turned down the invitation you finished up the Two Cities pizza you all had for lunch yesterday. Carol went to bed a couple hours ago.

         2228 hours. Next weekend Kim returns (and maybe Paul and the boys). We also hope to have "College Hunks Hauling Junk" here to pick up two desks, a couple file cabinets, a bookcase, two tables, an old large bed opening couch, a fifteen year old heavy duty treadmill and a lawn table with chairs and a large kids' table with four chairs and other assorted furniture and file cabinets. We will miss Mason but now that we are about to be in the thick of selling, I'll be glad when it's sold and we can literally move on and work on setting up the new digs, so to speak. They were putting on the roof when we left last Friday and we are up tomorrow afternoon to watch Brennan when Kim has a workday phone/video conference on Tuesday.

         Post. - Amorella

         2250 hours. I did catch an idea on the fly, a title of sorts -- "Accidental Dream". I'm sure I can put the words to use sometime before summer. 

Notes - Dad

         Evening. Carol, Kim and you worked on cleaning the basement most of the day. Owen and Brennan even helped at times. You drove to Good Will twice, once in the Odyssey. You drove to Half Price Books once. You put together about ten Staple business boxes and have used most of them, but earlier, before supper, Kim brought up a box of mostly old photographs you inherited from your mother, many you had not seen before. One struck you deeper than any other. It is your father's high school graduation picture. He appears and kind, friendly and happy fellow. You thought to yourself in the moment: 'I never knew this man'. - Amorella

       2042 hours. The father I knew, the man who helped raise me, I never met (consciously) until 1946 after World War II, a year after he and others in his company liberated Dachau in 1945. What a difference a war must make. If you were a scientist, a sports hunter and a sports fisherman, a member of a bowling league and/or watched college and/or professional football and you knew my father you were most likely friends. If you were a reader, which he also was, you were likely an avid reader in private (fiction and non-fiction), i.e. no real discussions or book club orientation. I never heard him discuss or talk about any book unless it had to do with UFO's. We bowled on the same team for two seasons, but we never had a conversation that I can remember. We were very good at ignoring each other whenever possible, that was our mutual, civilized peace. In his eighties he grew slightly more social and we exchanged pleasantries like most other family members. It was then that he casually mentioned while we were on a quiet walk at Otterbein's campus about five blocks from his and Mother's house on East Park Street, that it was okay that I was an English teacher and that I liked to write. That was it. I think I responded with, "that's good," or something similar in a non-committal manner. When Uncle Ernie was dying in the hospital he mentioned that my father was a good man. I shrugged my shoulders and smiled, but Uncle Ernie knew he was closer (in attachment) to being my father than Dad was. Uncle Ernie cared. Dad would have cared, I think, if I had enjoyed hunting and fishing and had been a scientist or in the sciences. We both enjoyed science fiction but we rarely if ever talked about it even when he knew I taught a class in it. My father-in-law and I discussed it and futures studies regularly. I think Dad was born a hundred years too late and I was born a hundred years to early. I respect the man for who he was as a human being. He had been an Eagle scout, I never got that high. I enjoyed camping with him I didn't mind hunting with him or fishing with him but never enjoyed killing game or catching fish. This is what is on my mind after seeing that photograph of my father when he was seventeen.

         Post. - Amorella

Notes - the reason, the reality

         Mid-afternoon. You are sitting near Kroger's on Mason-Montgomery Road waiting for Carol. Kim and the boys are to arrive about five o'clock then go to supper. Yesterday afternoon you drove to Kim and Paul's to stay for the night because you had a meeting about the shower glass door and wall in the master bath. You were there this morning at ten after stop at Schneider's for an irregular breakfast of donuts and milk on the way to Swain's [bath and accessories] a few miles south of OSU. When you stopped by the house this morning they had put the 'cover' on the entire roof and are working with the actual roofing today. You will be up next Monday for a meeting with Jim A. your foreman/manager at the house. Kim needs someone to watch Brennan Tuesday until three as she has a five hour phone/video conference that day. Once the roof is up, the 'siding' and stone go up, then the windows and doors, at least that is how you remember it from watching other construction at the site. Seven or eight houses are now being constructed at this time, up three from a week ago. You are surprised how fast the small area of about forty-two lots is filling up. - Amorella

         1557 hours. I think there are only about five to seven empty lots after today's observation. I know it is going to be somewhat noisier with I-71 about two hundred feet away and down about fifty feet below our location. However, another house being built about the same distance away further west is fine with the house almost finished. The walls, doors and windows, do a good job blocking out the traffic. Otherwise, if you sit on the porch and in the backyard you are going to hear some of it; the noise would be worse if we weren't fifty or so feet above the freeway. And, few kids in the neighborhood as it is designated for fifty-five year olds and older. Ohio does not make this a law, but the community does not allow child's playset and swings, etc. in the backyards.

         The family had supper at the 'Rocky Chair Place' off Fields-Ertel Road. Once home you worked in the basement while the boys watched their Netflix channel. You stopped in time to watch NBC News while Kim was giving the boys their baths then you three watched 'Rachel Maddow' before they retired and you are about to.

         2226 hours. I found another box with written material and notes from way back, some back to the sixties. I saved a little more than an inch high stack from a full file box. Out it went. I couldn't part with some. Too much emotional value. It wasn't all my writings, it was also about people I have known in life. I showed some to Kim and said I cannot do this, and showed her. She suggested I keep it and I said, "Well then, you can throw it out after I'm gone." She agreed that she could but she intimated that she might not. It is hard to give up intimate letters from friends and well wishes from students from long ago. I threw some out and came others. Why? I assume my heart knows. Certainly no one else does.

         Post. - Amorella

         2234 hours. Tomorrow we continue on. It has to be done. Better that Carol and I do it than save it all for Kim and Paul to do. We save a bit now and then for our own pleasure of knowing those words are safely kept. It is an obligation to family and friends and to ourselves. Family stuff is only important to some family. That's the way it always is. I would never give up Grandma Orndorff's 1916 high school yearbook or my parents' 1936 high school yearbook. It would be against my nature to do so.

         Your last sentence shows the reason, the reality . . . it would be against your nature. This is a more important comment than you are willing to admit. - Amorella