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The ordinary point of going to bed is to eventually go to sleep. The ordinary didn't happen much last night. I just lay there and lay there, waiting to drop off into the dreamtime, and it was hard to come by. I watched my youth pass me by instead. I remembered lots of events that I am ashamed of. I think that happened because of being able to physically see the world the way I did back when my eyes were fairly new and I was a child, and now they're new again. New again, but not new and perfect. I'm pretty sure I'll need at least reading glasses.
When I finally decided to go ahead and get outta bed it wasn't light outside yet. I could hear the vehicle noise from the state road about two miles away. When that quieted down I can hear the machines in the maintenance room over to the Wal-Mart SuperCenter located a little closer to town from me on that same paved road.
Whether I hear this annoying machine noise or not depends on the weather system. Low pressure systems seem to hold the noise down to earth. Like now. Low pressure and high humidity. That's supposed to change by sunset with a dryer, cooler high pressure system dropping south out of the Great Lakes region.
The events of my youth that I'm still ashamed of as an old man were fairly innocent affairs to review this morning. I didn't know any better than to act the way I did back then, and I was made to feel shame intentionally so that I would think about it the next time I felt tempted to dispute their word.
It was misbehavior only in the grown-up world, and grown-ups were who I had to live with, so I dutifully felt shame for my parent's sake. Feeling shame as a duty is not quite the same as when I arrived at a sense of shame by my own convictions. I appear to know better than to do that to myself, for any reason, unless it will get me what I want. The older I got and the further I got away from my parent's control the less shame I experienced.
Since it was up to me to decide whether I oughta feel ashamed or not as I got older, I decided not to, unless it was my only way out. This attitude didn't go over so well with my ex-wives and children. They didn't have the rebellious spirit I did. I sometime think my rebellious spirit was the reason my ex-wives got interested in me in the first place, and we seemed to get along fine until the children came along. Then, I was seen to be setting a bad example for my own kids. How could I fight that?
The adult way of life taught to them as children came alive for my ex-wives when they bore children of their own to care for, and the rules they were taught overwhelmed any curiosity they might have been formerly attracted to in me. As a result I've lived alone a lot. Around thirty years since my last divorce. I don't know why. I don't particularly like living alone. The world changed from what my parents made it into to compensate for how they were raised. Life left the mules and wagons behind, and got digitized to the max, much less electrified.
Nobody who grew up watching television can possibly comprehend the foundations of people who didn't. Even more so in regard to personal computers, and then the internet. They don't know what it's like to do without them. There is certainly no blame in that. Just a big generational gap that will never be closed.
Both of my parents lived a rural life in the poorest state in the union during the Great Depression, and without electricity in their early years except in the large cities. Street lights were something they gawked at in total amazement when they were allowed to go to town, or so they said. They lived twenty miles from town. It took two days to get there and back for my father's family using a mule and a wagon. My mother's family lived closer to town. It took them only one day to make a round trip to town. Only the youngest children in my parent's families could read or write.
The Great Depression proved to them that getting a formal education was their only salvation. That meant going to a boarding school after the sixth grade. Naturally, it became my salvation too as far as they were concerned. Not getting a college degree for myself became just another due cause for shame. I am is a shamed man. A sha-man. I heal people's shame by taking it upon myself. It's the one thing I'm good at, but it hurts.
In my pubescent rebellion against my parents I became the opposite of a formally educated person. I rebelled very powerfully, and it eventually cost me the respect of all my families. I actually thought it would make them love and admire me for standing up for myself. I was wrong. I'm wrong a lot. Some things never change.
It's light outside now. Only scattered, fluffy clouds in the sky. The sun will soon rise high in the sky and heat up everything. The temperatures are supposed to go up to the mid-nineties, and then the cool front is supposed to arrive by nightfall. The TV weathermen say the cool weather will stay for at least a week, but I don't believe it because it's too good to be true.
The cataract surgery has allowed me to see colors again. I had pretty much figured out the cataracts were making me blind, but I didn't realize they had interfered with the way I saw the colors of the objects around me. It took the surgery and the clear plastic lenses they replaced my natural lenses with for me to see the color of the world around me again.
If you had told me I didn't see the color of some object in our mutual presence I would have argued that you were wrong. I'm kind to myself in regard to my flaws. I pretend not to have them. It was only when the world around me proved to me that I was blind that I submitted to the eye surgery itself. I found out my view of colors was flawed on my own.
I literally don't remember ever arguing with anybody about the color of something. As far as I can tell, it was only after the surgery and receiving the new lenses, and writing here about my trips to Lowe's, and seeing the difference in the color of flowers after my right eye was fixed, that I realized I wasn't seeing what other people with clear vision was seeing. Now, I'm wondering why that never came up.
The colors I saw was still colors. What I saw was just not what many people must have been seeing. I didn't know it. How could I have? I saw what I saw, but I had to interpret the language other people used to describe how they saw colors, so I shined them on by assuming we both saw the same object in the same way. We didn't. I didn't, and it wasn't due to ignorance. I didn't ignore anything.
What I saw through my clouded, worn-out old lenses was just something I incrementally took for granted. Probably over decades. I've read that the lens of cigarette smokers turn brown. Makes sense to me. My lungs did. I started smoking when I was seventeen. I only stopped four years ago this month. I've probably not seen pure colors for forty years. I now know I was innocently color blind. I didn't know before the surgery, and nobody else knew either.
I can never be innocent about colors again, but I am is still jaded and world-weary. It's interesting to see the real colors again. I gotta go to the North Carolina Art Museum and take another gander at Thomas Cole's painting of that Hudson River valley. Maybe the red splash of color I loved as a kid is still there, and it was just me that changed, and not the painting or the light in the new museum building they moved it to. Maybe my own paintings don't represent what I thought they did. No blame. It's time for a burning of the old days.
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