The sun’s coming up again this morning, though judging by
last evening's posts on social media, many of my friends didn’t expect it to.
I guess, even though it’s Monday, the day is ours to do with
what we wish. I’ve already decided to skip the news and spend the morning with
music in the background. That always helps me get off to a better start.
Already, some random thoughts have filtered through the haze that passes as a
brain in my case.
Saw where a woman got herself quoted in the state newspaper
as saying she would like to write a book called Depression is a Choice. I’m not sure of the context or details
about her life. She probably just meant to be quippy and quotable. It still
offended me.
I’ve lost two family members and at least one business associate
to depression, and I’ll damn assure you that none of them chose it. That doesn’t
include my brother veterans.
In two days, we begin the commemoration of the beginning of the
1968 Tet Offensive in that dark and dreary point in history, in a land far from
the society balls of America. Those of us who survived, to a person, can tell stories
about depression and, at the same time tell you where you can put the word “choice.”
Anyway, it’s a new day. I spent the afternoon yesterday attending
the visitation for a cousin who died last week. He had led a full life, but I hadn’t
seen much of him in our adult lives and didn’t know his family well. Still, the
experience touched me, as the death of any family member will. Additionally,
visiting the place where I was born and raised always innervates nodes of
memories in me, like the smell of the inside of an old church.
Passing through one neighborhood, I recalled a young man
from my school days, a gifted athlete and straight-A student—handsome, personable,
popular, envied, and without blemish nor impediment to ultimate glory, until
the day he, unaware of the danger, decided to treat sore muscles from football practice
with an electric massager while taking a bath. It could have been any of us. We
had never been adequately warned about the dangers of an otherwise benevolent
technology. Progress always comes with a price, a price he paid to save the
rest of us.
I drove other old streets of a city that had once been grand
and prosperous … for half its inhabitants. Its grandeur has fled in modern
times, along with its glory, to find more tranquil lives in places with homogeneous
populations of the proper type. That’s just a sign of our times. Lists published
on the “net” tell us what cities are winners and which are losers in this redistribution,
at least as society defines such things. Sometimes I feel that the Galilean
might come up with different lists of places where we should go.
One never knows, does one?
On the way back, I drove through a town, population 84, that
had once been a thriving community that even boasted its own bank. The empty
concrete slabs tell us how many businesses flourished there back in the day
when an agricultural economy supported such places. I counted, simply driving
through, maybe a dozen such bleak reminders.
Life is short, shorter for some than others. Grandeur flees. Glory seeks solace. Someday, if we are lucky,
a group of folks will gather in a room and share anecdotes about us.
What to do on a new Monday?
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