It's dank and cold outside. It has rained a couple of times this morning, and by afternoon it's supposed to set in and rain all day and maybe tomorrow too. The TV weathermen seem very pleased about this because the yearly average for rainfall is down three inches, and this rain should bring the water table up to normal for the Spring surge of plants thrusting up through the Earth with the coming of the green.
I sit here with the space heaters noisily running to knock the edge off the cold inside my house, but never really heating it. I wear the same clothes inside that I wear outside. Just to think that in a couple of months I'll get up in the morning and never bother to put my shoes and socks on, is a pleasant thought right now. That's the only thing about winter besides it getting cold that I don't care much for. I don't like wearing clothes any more than i have to. That's the biggest attraction I used to have for spending the winter in Key West.
It seems silly to not like to wear clothes. I haven't had a place where I could run around nakid until I built my house. It's back off the paved road just so I could have some privacy. I don't run around nakid in front of visitors. I don't care if they see me nakid when they drive up, but I put on enough clothes to cover my old body to keep from making my guests uncomfortable. It's not a pretty sight to see me nakid these days, but since I don't keep any mirrors handy, I don't have to look at me.
One of the more shocking things about getting old is to see the old women I knew when we were both young. For some odd reason I didn't expect them to get old like me. They certainly have though. Two of them I knew fairly well died of breast cancer. That must have struck them as odd to have the very part of themselves that defined them as females going south on them.
I don't remember seeing either one of those women as adults beyond high school. As far as the female gender goes I don't understand what I feel like I need to know about them until they have babies. That changes everything about the way a woman thinks about herself. Up until they experience childbirth, I don't think most women have any idea of what they're really like, and if they don't, how can anybody else?
I got an invitation to gather with my graduating high school class at one of the local restaurants soon. They don't wanna wait another five years because of how many of us will probably die of old age before then. I deliberately did not go to the Fiftieth reunion, but I'm thinking of going to this affair just to update my visual impression of what the women look like. I've been told that some of them eat at the same cafe I do, but I don't recognize them. They no longer look like the 17 year old girls I see in my mind's eye when I associate with their maiden names.
There always seems to be somebody who gets drunk and makes a fool out of themselves at these high school reunions. I never thought it would be me, but it was. I was living in Mississippi when the Twentieth Reunion came up. I got very excited about driving up here to attend. An ear infection I had ignored decided to take a turn for the worse on the drive up, and when we got here we went straight to the Emergency Room. They shot me up with antibiotics and gave me some pain pills to make it through the reunion.
Either I forgot that pain pills and booze don't mix well or I just ignored that after just one strong slug of whiskey I was getting loopy. It only took one more drink to allow me to get stupid drunk and become the drunk from hell. A lotta people didn't respond well to my craziness, and refused to come to any more reunions if I was gonna be there. The very people who were my closest friends in high school. I was very ashamed of what I did, but my apologies later didn't seem to make any difference with them. No blame.
Maybe it's because I think I've paid for my mistakes that I'm thinking about attending this year. For thirty years I couldn't remember what I did and said while I was drunk that pissed these former friends off so bad they never wanted to be in my presence again for any reason. Nobody that knew would tell me anything, but eventually I was able to piece it together. It was just my normal sarcasm, but I was really drunk, and my sarcasm didn't come across as an attempt to humor in that condition.
I have regretted embarrassing my ex-wife and hurting my former friend's feelings for a long time. Now, my wife of the time and my friends of the time are no longer my wife and no longer my friends, and worse, I could have done all I did on purpose. I think I intended to end up living alone here in the woods by myself.
My former wives and my former friends seemed like obstacles to what I intended for myself all along. The problem is that I didn't know what I intended, even when I did what I did to make things happen the way they did for reasons unknown. They all said they loved me, with the problem being, that unbeknownst to them... they really did. Sometime i think I'm the only-est person in my world who knows what love IS. They know this, and reach out, but with a closed fist instead of empty-handed. They've gotten what they wanted from me and have nothing to give in return.
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
