I hope you had a good return to King's Beach. I just checked the weather for Lake Tahoe, and see the outlook is for "sunny" as far into the future as the weatherman sees. We have been having many days of forty-five degree weather, with clouds, drizzle and fog, with "partly cloudy" being what we have to look for for the next few days.
We spent yesterday evening with Margaret's hospice patient, who is in her eighties. She is an interesting person, with very clear memories of humorous and unusual happenings from long ago, but not very good recall of near-term events. She's the one who likes cloudy weather. She said that clear, sunny skies are depressing for her, but when it is cloudy and gray she finds it comforting, as if she was under a nice warm quilt. I asked her if she had ever met anyone else in her long life that felt the same way she does, and she said no. A sample memory of hers was that her first husband had been a methodist minister, but he was kind of sickly. They lived in Iowa. Her husband was friends with the town undertaker, who was a tall bald-headed man named something like Duddy Smithweather. After funerals, the undertaker would give a whole bunch of the flowers to the minister, saying he should taken them home and use them to decorate his house, so they wouldn't go to waste. Eventually, the sickly husband died -- this was 30 or 40 years ago. When the funeral was all over, the undertaker patted the wife (now the hospice woman) on the head and said, "Well, you've been a good little soldier."
I didn't realize Jane was so stressed out during high school. What was the problem?
Not only do I find that people often seem either vacant or downright distressed when I speak, I have also become increasingly aware that when I speak, other people don't hear the same message that I thought I was saying. Sometimes what they hear is just a little different, sometimes it's so different it's frightening. It makes me wonder if when I say "STOP!" perhaps some people hear "GO!" I don't know if everyone has this same experience, or if it's worse for me. Because another thing I increasingly realize as the years pass is that I am essentially different from most people in a lot of ways. Which is why I feel most comfortable talking with people who are retarded, senile, children, delusional, or foreign... such people are in no position to decide what is normal and what is not.
With all these ancestors turning over in their graves, it's too bad that energy can't be harnessed somehow from all that activity. All these bodies turning in graves are like a turbine. It could almost be a kind of job, constantly doing things that will cause them to keep turning, just to keep up the energy output.
That's interesting you had all those doctors and lawyers on your dad's side of the family as well. On my dad's side of the family, it was all really poor white people, the kind of people they would show in a movie like To Kill a Mockingbird as a menacing group of unshaven, furtive, squinty-eyed drunks, living in squalid conditions and saying things like, "Willard, we got to kill ourselves a nigger." They despised the idea of anyone getting an education, so my dad deserves some credit for pulling himself up out of that desperate situation, to the point where he attended college for a couple of years, though I don't think he ever graduated. He had to leave home when he was about 14 and lie about his age to get into the navy, in order to start the process of pulling off his escape. I'm sure his background showed to some degree when he met grandmother and grandfather and told them he intended to marry their oldest daughter, and that they weren't too happy about it. Perhaps they are still turning over in their graves about it.
--edward
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