Notes - pop up /

       Dusk. You drove home late morning then had dinner at Cracker Barrel mid-afternoon. The trash is out at the street and earlier you watched NBC News and last week's "Blacklist". You both read Sunday's paper, putting off yesterday's until tomorrow. You scheduled Joseph Toyota for Tuesday at nine to fix ongoing problems. - Amorella

       2217 hours. Kim, Paul and the boys arrived home about an hour before you did. Tim worked on cleaning up the local dam problem and with more rain yesterday and today there were no problems this time. Tim King is our local in-community hero today, that's my humble proclamation. We also watched the first few minutes of "Saturday Night Live" -- funny political skit even without actor of Trump literally on the scene. Growing older is interesting. A reflection on one's life is not how I thought it would be -- it comes in short spurts -- alternating electrical currents of feeling move about on a memory or two out of the blue. At ten, hiding under a bush in Grandma Schick's side yard, hiding from sister Cathy and cousin Marilyn (both five). The memory is my hand touching the bush pulling it in so they couldn't see me. The memory is the right hand pulling the branches inward making the leaves more of a wall. Title of the memory, "Right Hand Pulling Branches In" not playing tag or Cathy or Marilyn or even Grandma Schick. This would have been in the summer of 1952. It is not an important memory but that evidently doesn't make any difference. I have a lot of "touch" memories. Picking up an old wooden canoe is another. It hurt my fingers and hands lifting one end of it -- the surprise of how heavy it was. I was probably twelve. It was at Alum Creek down by the island and bridge on Main Street across from the water treatment plant. I was probably going fishing with Dad but I don't remember who was at the other end of the canoe. Dad was always trying to share what he loved with me -- hunting and fishing. He won out with camping. I loved going camping and hiking in the woods. I loved Boy Scout events and was proud my dad was a scoutmaster and an Eagle Scout in his day. I loved roughing it from time to time. To be going to sleep in a small tent in the middle of a pretty big woods was fine, especially when I had a friend along. Family camping was not the same thing, then I would have liked to slept nearby but in a tent by myself. There was always a quiet tension when Dad was in charge. I didn't like him ordering me around, commanding rather than asking. He could do this silently with body language. It seemed wrong to me for him to try to control everybody, but later I realized no one else felt this tension, just me. Enough retrospection for the night. This is how growing older is from time to time. Everybody has their own memories that pop up from nowhere. Some good, some bad, some mixed - just like life.

       Post. - Amorella