Today’s Thursday Thought:
How many acorns do squirrels forget about? Do they know? Does that frustrate them? What is squirrel protocol if you find another squirrel’s acorn? Survival of the fittest and eat it? Cover it back up so Bill will not starve this winter? What is the squirrel code?
A lot can be said about good friendships. There are just some people in this world who we meet and they stick with us. Real friends have helped each other, fought each other, disagreed with each other, and stood by each other through myriad situations. These friendships can happen in a week or over the past 30 years. Some friends come into, and stay in, your life due to specific shared situations. Many times you can be separated from your friends for weeks, months, or years, yet the next time you see them it is like hardly a moment has passed.
I have watched my father, who is a Colorado native, live in Mississippi away from his friends and immediate family my entire life. I have also spent these 40 years watching him foster one of the most amazing friendships of which I know. The man in the picture above is my father’s best friend, Ray. I even share his name as my middle name. They have known each other since high school. They have lived through decades of joys and tragedies together. They call each other to check in at random intervals, often to make a joke at the other’s expense. In a financially questionable deal, they have also had a longstanding continuous bet involving the Denver Broncos season record vs. the New Orleans Saints season record. That bet alone has created many laughs, empty wallets, and a host of jokes between the two during the seasons through the years. I have made some very good friends through the years, but theirs has always been my gold standard.
Just yesterday I was at work and feeling a little down. Not depressed, but unsettled with my day as it had unfolded to that point. I managed to get off work in time to watch the 2nd half of the New Orleans Saints game with a group of my friends, of which I have known between this past year and all the way to over 30 years. There was an immediate release of my inner funk. I felt a catharsis and serenity while living in the moment with these people as we watched our football team try to win the game. It made me cherish that time even more because I realized that I have the opportunity to see my friends on a fairly regular basis should I so choose. My father and Ray have not had that opportunity.
There is not really a closing point to this because all of it is still happening. So go find the people in your life and keep making good, deep friendships. Play a little joke on your friends. Buy them a 6-pack of their favorite beer for no reason, but only give them 5 because you drank one. Foster that friendship with someone who knows you so well that they can get under your skin, in a good way, from 6 states away. Find yourself a Ray.
As I grow older, I appreciate a good night’s rest. This is a fairly great character development for me. As a teenager or in college, I would gladly stay up until all hours of the night and sleep until noon or later if possible. I have always been a night owl by nature. Now that I am a little older and I have a job where I work mornings, it means a little more to me when the possibility of sleeping in beyond 6:00 a.m. occurs.
The problem is that never happens anymore. I have three furry children whose group mission in life is to see how early and how often they can wake me. I have two cats and one dog. They all have their own style and motives to accomplish this feat. In my best Nick Kroll (The League) voice, “COLLUSION!”
The youngest cat, Tarball, is 3 years old and 16lbs. He is the catalyst for the whole equation. He usually starts the procedure somewhere between 4:30 a.m. and 6:30 a.m. by repeatedly, rhythmically, and methodically, pawing at every door, cabinet, wall, or even plastic storage box that he can find. Now that may not sound like much, but it is the feline equivalent of Chinese water torture. He is persistent. It will continue for hours if unchecked. Yelling, a spray bottle, thrown pillows, none of these things matter in his world. I have deduced through much frustration, trial, and error, that he wants one or more of these four things:
So, after hoping today will be the day he shows mercy, I usually get out of my warm bed and attempt to deduce which of the needs must be filled. Once satiated, he often crawls onto the bed and goes to sleep again. Traditionally, his resting area is between my knees. It is amazing how effectively 16lbs of cat can pin the lower half of your body to the bed.
That is when the oldest of the three, Oscar, also a cat, goes to work. He has a perpetual grumpiness about his visage, but he is a snuggler at the core. As I lie back down to squeeze more sleep into my body, that is when he walks across the pillows and my face to curl up against me in my right armpit. Always the right armpit. Now, after I get over the assault to my face, this behavior is quite endearing and I don’t mind it one bit, except for the fact that I now have another 16lbs of cat pinning down the right half of my torso beneath the covers. But, I want to return to sleep, so it is alright. This cat, however, is sometimes prone to waking from a dead sleep and launching himself, with surprising speed that belies his size, to anywhere except right where he was resting. That is when I wake up again because surely armageddon is coming via a horde of robot ninjas. Nope. It is only the crazed cat dreams.
Grunt, the 70lb dog, is the final horseman of the Day Off Apocalypse. He generally rests at the foot of the bed or on the neighboring pillow through the feline insanity, sometimes getting annoyed and retreating to the living room couch for his own rest. Rest that he carefully saves up then to sit by the front door or the side of my bed at around 6 a.m. letting out a steadily paced barrage of slow groans or grunts until I find a way to disengage from 32lbs of cat and stumble my way to the front door. I understand he has been pent up in the house all night and may need to use the yard. That is my responsibility as his person. It is only fair because he neither has opposable thumbs nor an understanding of doorknobs and deadbolts. Some days, though, he won’t go outside when I open that door. He looks out, looks up at me, then turns around and saunters off into the bedroom to resume his place on the spare pillow next to mine.
That is when I walk back into the bedroom to find these furry three strewn in their various positions across the queen-sized bed. They may look like they are now settled, but I know the truth. They are reloading.
“Jim walked in the door to find a panda on the couch eating potato chips. Over the rustle of the bag, the panda asked Jim where his cat, Seymour, was. Jim was perplexed because Seymour usually follows an online ballet tutorial on Tuesday afternoons. “Maybe he went out for more beer?” mused Jim out loud.
At that, the panda jumped off the couch and darted out the door, almost knocking Jim to the floor as he passed. Stumbling away, Jim knocked a pineapple off the top of the coat rack. It landed with a thud on the hardwood floor and rolled behind the couch.”
I do not know where that came from. I was bored mid-November and quickly wrote that in my notebook. Thumbing through the notebook today and I still found it so random and slightly funny. I considered trying to continue the narrative, but I was fairly sure I would be incapable of entering that frame of mind today, if ever again at all.
Weird moments like that have comprised my whole thought process for many years. Sometimes I have been misunderstood when people were talking near me. Often there would be a smirk or a small chuckle, not because of their discussion content, but because my brain spat out something akin to this. Yet, I was the only one who was aware of it. The people would think I was laughing at them or belittling the tragic tale they were telling. Usually, it was simply my brain, awash with warped years of experiences from time in schools, restaurants, the army, and as a paramedic, that produced my socially inappropriate reactions.
Now, the above paragraph is not all that weird in the overall scheme of things. Plenty of people out there get much more weird. For me it is actually a step forward. The experiences of the past decade have made most of my internal monologue turn in either a dark or a negative direction; sometimes both. I have been sour. I have not always been this way. It goes against my base self. I am starting 2018 with a personal challenge of trying to find the humor, joy, and wonder in life again. Now, that does not mean that I will not write something off-color or darkly humorous, but this year will be best lived from a positive perspective. That means more time spent enjoying friends, travel, education, and personal exploration. We should all laugh a lot more…for our own health.
How surprised are tadpoles when they sprout their back legs?
A Flower For Every Season
Beauty is the crimson Rose
Flaring red so that people
Will come close to smell
Beauty
Personality is the golden Dandelion
Erupting in yellow so that people
Will come close and end up
With a splotch of colorful personality
On their nose
Mix the two and the result
Is the ivory Honeysuckle
The pleasant aroma attracts people
To come nearer and discover
The sweet honey inside.
Today I embark on a journey of unknown proportions. This is where I crack the seal on all that has been bottled up inside the ol’ brain pan for these many years. It has been too long since my days of passing along my musings while I was deployed with the Army; over a decade of holding things inside, actually. So, now let us see if we can get a little traction and talk about some of the random humor, sadness, love, tragedy, anger, quirks, and joy. Those are just a few aspects of this thing called life that come to mind. My time riding in the passenger seat is over. It is time to take the wheel again and see where I can go…and yes, there will most certainly be U-turns.
Riddell's Ramblings 