One of the reasons I don't let people get up next to me emotionally is that I sometime feel what they feel to the point that it seems like I take what makes 'em feel bad and work it out through my own body. I've played around with this idea for a long time now, and I'm very familiar with the response I get to my way of saying it.
I had to stop writing for a moment to listen to Tom T. Hall sing about "old dogs and children, and watermelon wine...". I'm not a big fan of country music, but some of their story-tellers have had a profound affect on me. Even as I sat here and watched this old man perform again I was truly impressed with how easily he moved me emotionally in the same way he did when we were both much younger. I guess what I really seem attracted to nostalgically are the various singer/songwriters who perform their own music worse than anybody who makes the big hits with them. It seems evenly divided between the various genres of music, but the connecting factor is that they write and perform. LIke I did, of course.
I wax pretty empathic at times. Especially with my two brothers. My younger brother was working a Sperry Railcar up in Maine on a job I worked too, but got fired for replacing my bosses' 80 proof vodka with 150 proof white likker, and his sneak-drinking didn't turn out the way it usually did. My brother had some sort of intestinal twistage thing happen, and he like to have died. At the local hospital where a huge majority of the population were of French descent and Catholic, he got so ill they called in a priest who performed the last rites on him
I was down in Louisiana working a shrimp boat, and I started writing a poem with some strong sense of urgency, but without knowing why. From two thousand miles away I described a situation poetically that matched my brother's piteous state of health. He survived, of course, but barely. The hospital had called my parents as his next of kin, and my mother went up there. Out of her mind with her middle boy. I'm thinking that probably added a bunch of psychic intensity to the situation.
Later, when he told me what happened and gave me a first-hand account of what he experienced, I asked him how, if he was on death's door, could he have known the Catholic priest administered last rites? He told me, quite cockily, I might add, that he knew he was dying even before the nurses called the priest, but he "knew" he was dying from outside of his body.
He told me he somehow left his body and all the pain it was suffering, and that when the priest came in the room, he was watching what happened from where he hovered over in the corner of the room up in the ceiling. Soon after the priest left the room, my brother said he left the room too, leaving his dying body on the bed.
I think he said he had accepted that death was inevitable, and he floated/flew outside into the north woods of Maine, and suddenly he found himself riding on the antlers of a huge bull moose as it ran crashing through the woods after a female moose. He's told me this story many times. Usually at my request. He gets a mischievous look in his eye when he gets to the part about riding on the moose's head, but over the years he's told a fairly consistent story.
Later, he found himself back in his body, and my mother was on her knees beside his bed begging him to not leave her here. I don't think this brother reads my blog, but if he did, he'd tell me I didn't listen to a word he said. Okay, I made up the bit about our mother, but maybe she's watching over my shoulder to see if I wrote something kind about her.
More recently, my youngest brother went to his doctor for a regular check-up, and ended up at the regional hospital where he got some sort of pacemaker installed. All four of his siblings went to their own heath care professional to see if they were having a heart attack, and none of us knew about what the others had done or about our brother going to the hospital in the first place.
I think this sort of thing happens more with families that move around a lot, and the only people they know well or feel they can depend on are the members of their natal family that moves around with them. Like service brats and preacher's kids. In the last couple of decades, this lifestyle seems to have affected more and more families.
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.
