I somewhat recall an in-class assignment I had in one of my English classes during my technical college days some years ago. We had to do some sort of write up on Emily Dickinson’s poem, “I Like to See it Lap the Miles.” I definitely recall being unsure exactly what we were supposed to do or the objective of the assignment, so I began writing sort of a “stream of consciousness,” ideas and observations of the poem, stringing them together like the cars on a locomotive that Dickinson describes in the poem. I missed the point of the assignment but got an excellent grade for my “creativeness.” As I don’t have another blog entry ready to go just yet, I think I’ll try the stream of consciousness approach yet again.
Ah, spring has arrived yet again in the south. The warmer weather comes after a false start a few weeks ago, where the temperature got up into the upper 70s to low 80s, only to fall back into the 50s again within a few days time. Certain signs that spring is here can be found on the pine trees and the numerous pollen blooms (for lack of a better term) on the end of the branches, not to mention the hundred of bees that are now flying around. In the south during the months of April and May, every car is yellow regardless of what color it was when you purchased it. It’s not uncommon to watch the evening weather report on the local news to see that the “extreme” pollen count for any given day has been surpassed by four hundred percent. My personal favorites are windy days, when the air is literally filled with yellow clouds of pollen.
Despite the yellow menace (pollen, not Asian immigrants) I spent the better part of Sunday morning out on my back deck trying to make some headway into the biography of FDR I’ve been reading for the past few months. I’ve finally gotten to the 400-page mark in the book, which is only a quarter of the book. I’m accustomed to being done or almost done at this point in most books! Admittedly it’s hard to plow through a twelve-hundred page book when you allow yourself to be sidetracked by other books that are, or were, in the waiting list. The small font size doesn’t help either, as the publisher can cram much more material onto two pages—not to mention this is the only book right now that requires use of my reading glasses (one of my few concessions to the aging process). But on this particular morning I was able to make quite a bit of progress towards getting to the end of the book.
During breaks in my reading, I sat back and tried to get lost in my thoughts. In the short distance that morning a hoot owl could be heard, his call coming from somewhere along the wooded slope my house sets atop. Suddenly I was back in seventh grade, in particular Mrs. Ryan’s social studies class. It was late spring, and our elementary school was not air conditioned so the windows were open. Believe me, in the south a school without air conditioning, or any building that lacks it for that matter, is not where you want to be and not very conducive to learning. From the tree line beyond the cow pasture next to the school (yes, next to the school) a hoot owl would make his/her presence known just about everyday. The first time Mrs. Ryan heard this, she asked the class, “Okay, who’s making that noise??” And she asked that multiple times, so fierce was her determination to discover the offending student, little knowing the sound was coming from outside. She had a southern accent so I had assumed she was from around these here parts and knew about hoot owls. Apparently not. Perhaps Mrs. Ryan knew about social studies, but she didn’t know a damn thing about hoot owls. And I wonder why our state ranks nearly last in educational rankings.
As the sun began to clear the tall oaks that are behind the house, the glare from reading sunlit pages (magnified 1.5x with my glasses) started to give everything I looked at a bluish hue. I stopped to flex my hands, which were starting to cramp from trying to hold the book at an angle least reflective of the sunlight. Geez, I thought to myself. My hands look so old! Maybe it’s just the dry skin, I tried to reassure myself. Most people I know guess wrong when it comes to my age; it would seem that in my face I don’t look as old as I am. A lot of the folks I work with have been surprised when I’ve told them my real age. One of the reasons I’ve grown facial hair is to add a few years to my appearance—well, that and I look dorky without it. Last Saturday my daughter had to ask me, “Why do you have wrinkles?” I resisted the urge to tell her they come with being a parent and explained how skin loses its elasticity as you get older. Sigh.
It then occurred to me how little things have changed in my life the past few years as far as my daughter is concerned. She truly is a “Daddy’s Little Girl.” At one point of time my wife had exclusive rights to give the child a bath; on occasion I would pitch in at bathtime as needed but most of my duties entailed getting the child up and dressed in the mornings, get her to daycare, get myself to classes then to work, pick the child up afterwards, and then prepare dinner. Juggling a full load of college classes with a job and an infant/toddler is exhausting work, take it from me. I’ve been out of college three years now and I’m still feeling tired from the ordeal. At least I had my wife to help out; my hat is really off to those single moms who are trying to juggle those responsibilities without a safety net.
But I digress. A few years ago bathtime fell within the realm of tasks my wife would take on. Since we moved into our house three years ago my daughter has requested, nay, demanded, that I be the one who gets her into and out of the tub. I don’t mind, really, except during those times when I’m busy with something else, for example, “Sorry, sweetheart, Daddy’s hanging a ceiling fan. Mommy’s going to give you your bath tonight.” That’s usually followed by three minutes of whining. The task of giving the child her bath this past weekend was mine. I had hung a net in her tub the weekend before as a place to keep her tub toys, and it was then that I noticed that she had more Barbie’s in her bath than any hot tub at the Playboy Mansion.
With the arrival of spring and clouds of pollen also comes any number of plants blooming around the house. As I prepared myself to delve back into my book I noticed the sweet smell of some flowering plant nearby. I’m still not sure what plant it was; it’s too early for honeysuckle; we’re too low in elevation for mountain laurel; we have some shrubs on either side of the yard with white blooms but I’ve no idea what they are. Perhaps it was the wisteria growing in our neighbor’s yard. Regardless, it was a nice smell for a change, not the fowl odor that blooms on Bradford Pear trees emit in early March. For twenty seconds I caught a case of Spring Fever, and began thinking of people I know and have known—family members who have passed away, friends I’ve had for many years, other friends who passed into and out of my life with so much cat burglar like stealthness, former girlfriends. Yes, spring; filthy, shameful spring. I could consider all the “what ifs” in my life, speculate how my life would be different now if I had made one or two decisions differently. But I find the “what is” much more preferable to the “what ifs.”
The twenty seconds of Spring Fever, which in recent years has been more like a minor case of melancholy than anything else, passed by quickly and I considered myself healed of all the evils of the illness. Perhaps my immune system would be better equipped to fight off Spring Fever if I took some time off. Certainly I could use some time off to try to catch up on some sleep and generally rediscover my life’s “center.” I have four months of combined accumulated sick and annual leave, and wouldn’t it be nice to use it all up at once. Four months with pay! That would be nice, but it ain’t gonna happen. I could certainly use that time to copy most of the movies on my DVR onto DVDs, something I’m going to need to do soon as I’ve used ninety hours of the total ninety-six hours the machine will record. I seem to add a lot of movies during free preview weekends of HBO and Showtime. HBO had theirs a few weeks ago. I saw Napoleon Dynamite for the first time. I knew of the movie, the more quotable lines of dialogue, and its place in current pop culture, so I made it a point to see it…and I didn’t get it. My DVR had been set to record the movie, but I shut it off after twenty-three minutes. Maybe I need to see it again, to see if I can catch anything I’m missing. Or maybe I see a little bit of myself in Napoleon which I don’t find very funny. Also recorded Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban; I have no desire to read the Harry Potter series of books, but I find the movies to be entertaining.
Showtime did their free preview this past weekend. For the most part I didn’t think the movies they were offering up were as good as the lineup on HBO, but they did show The Spongebob Squarepants Movie on Saturday morning. I’m very hit-or-miss with Spongebob, but I liked the movie. They added a few jokes that would never make it into the regular episodes on Nickelodeon. And as my wife would quickly point out to anyone who asks, I’m just a big kid anyway.
Enough! I had allowed myself to distract myself long enough and it was time to get back to my book. When I left off, FDR was hunting a cyborg from the future who was hunting a lady named Sarah Conner. No, wait…different story. I got back to my book and was well along with the first page when my daughter joined me on the back deck. For all practical purposes reading time was over. Besides, it was noon though I didn’t realize it, the time change the night before throwing off my internal clock. In a couple of hours we had a birthday party to go to, so it was time to feed the child lunch and get her ready to be a social butterfly again. Boy, I could use a vacation.
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