Images of my Life

Sometimes you wake when it's still dark and stare up thinking hard. Sleep has fled though the time tells you that you should have absolutely no knowledge of what time it is.

But ... you do.

So you lay there staring at the images projected in your brain as though it is a slide show of your life. People, places and different versions of you comprise the presentation that refuses to be shut off.

So lying in bed in the night ... the bright lights of your life parade across the stage designed for one. And it is you.

That was me this morning. About an hour before I normally wake, I was staring at the images being flashed on the ceiling.

There I was as a much younger me, longer hair that was lighter than now, before my stomach got thicker, when I dressed in cold weather clothes because we lived in a place where the skies were always gray and bitter winds seemed to always blow. Yet I am smiling ... holding two babies, one in each arm ... knowing that everything's going to be alright because ... I was too young to know that sometimes things are not always alright.

The next image inexplicably pushes this one out of the way. We are holding hands. She is blond and beautiful and we are in an apple orchard. Our children are feeding ducks on a pond. It is the fall of the year. The leaves are splashes of red, orange, yellow, and green. Large brown ones litter the yard. We're talking intensely about ... I don't remember.

Flash ... now I am sitting in my car many years later beside the parking garage a block from the Savannah Desoto Hilton. It is raining so I sit there. In those days I always carried a notebook with me so I grabbed it and start writing a description of sitting alone in car while its raining and I'm full of sadness. There is a speech that a Rotary Club wants from me but I'm in no hurry. I write about the rain dripping off of the leaves of the massive oak trees. I sigh ... ... tears stream from my eyes ... and no matter how much air I suck in my chest is hollow.

Then I am standing in the pulpit of the St. John Baptiste Church in Havana Cuba. A very cute college student in very tight blue jeans is standing next to me translating everything that I say in English into Spanish. At one point she looks at me and tells to use more words. I am speaking to the large audience as though they are third graders. I feel stupid.

Now I walk into my house from a trip. Goddess goes nuts which is familiar but something is strange. I stand and comprehend the strangeness. Stumbling into the bed room I open her closet ... it is empty. I collapse onto the floor and Goddess licks my face.

Tired and exhausted I stand on the beach in St. Martin when my cellphone rings. A Board Chair who chooses to remain anonymous starts barking orders and acting like Hitler to make himself bigger than he is. And it's over. My friend Conner appears from nowhere and puts his arm around me. "Fuck him," he says.

I am now sitting on the beloved back deck and Fran comes back from the dead to tell me that she still loves me. That in spite of being unloved by many ... I AM LOVED. Fran dances in delight. She makes me laugh out loud for the first time in months.

Returning to the scene of the crimes I sit a conference room table surrounded by people I used to love but who now have little use for me. And I don't care for most of them either but then I do something stupid. I say the things that somebody else wanted me to say ... and not anything that I felt or believed or knew ... and my list of regrets grew.

The Palm Trees outside of my bedroom window shake. Turning my head from the projector of my life ... I watch them. Goddess rams her body into the side of the bed which now has a wooden frame on the side so it surprises her. It is a new bed to replace one that no longer held any love ... or anything else. She cries out loud which makes me sit upright in an instant. I fall out of the bed onto the floor with her. She kisses me "Good Morning."

Standing I stare up at the ceiling which is dark and blank.

That was then ... this is now.

Wide awake, I feel my body full of ... readiness.

"Hey Goddess," I say out loud. "Let's go."

Her tail wags vigorously at the things that are coming.