Note to Orlando

 

Orlando

2:51am. Coffee, a Trulieve chocolate drop, bustling about in the kitchen, gathering ingredients for sweet potato chili. Set the crock pot on low for eight hours or four on high. You know the drill.  Alexa playing old Moody Blues stuff. Thinking about Brooke being gone, remembering a time we all shared so many years ago. It seems I generally entertain the same memory points, ones I’ve revisited for 50 years, the rest of it streaked and unclear, a dirty window to a familiar but unspecific swirl. Another cosmos far, far away.

Maybe I’ll kick it up a notch,  Oye Como Va! Images of you turned to the record player, bellbottom jeans sweeping an acrylic carpet made of orange sandpaper. 

There was a cigarette machine at the bottom of our stairs. It came as a surprise to me recently when I realized that I hadn't seen one in years.

Peace & Love my friend...

Rumspringa

 

 

A friend in his 70’s was patting himself on the back for having completed a few days of productivity. He was proud of acting like a responsible adult, actually getting shit done. Apparently riding a wave of “fuck off” days as he called them, is more his norm.

A good boy, but only briefly.

That made me smile with admission of the fact that after I fully retired four years ago, every day for me is a “fuck off” day. Never inserting a “responsible adult” day, I’m like Snoopy lost in dance.

A permanent Rumspringa.

Sore from pinching myself about today, the only productivity day I’ll even consider, is tomorrow.

Satchmo sings in a never-ending loop:

“I see skies of blue, and clouds of white
The bright blessed days, dark sacred nights
And I think to myself
What a wonderful world”

If I had known it was going to be this good, I would have retired in my twenties.

“We got married in a fever, hotter than a pepper sprout.”

 

“We got married in a fever, hotter than a pepper sprout.”

That was on a cold January day in the front parlor of a Justice of the Peace 45 years ago. She was 21, I would turn 30 some eight days later.

We immediately moved to a shack on 38 remote acres of Ohio woodland. A gift from my brother and commuting distance to Ohio University. Our closest neighbor was a half mile away, living and raising her brood in a Tepee.

On that birthday night, my brother generously offered to buy us a lobster dinner to celebrate. We were to meet in town. But Carla and I had never lived together before, so I learned my first lesson in “Carla time”. Things happen when all the stars align for her, but not until then. Our 7pm dinner became, 8, 9, …maybe tomorrow.

I crashed.

At 3am, she woke me up to present the birthday cake she made for me. No easy task with a broken-down antique wood stove that had been converted to propane. The tank outside leaned drunkenly up against the front stoop.

No pluming or running water.

More like a bread bowl with a liquid center than cake, but in the middle of the night, with my bride of eight days, that thing tasted like euphoria.

It was better than any lobster dinner could ever be.

I hadn’t been looking for Betty Crocker or a maid. Actually, I hadn’t been looking at all. But along came this girl. So quick and bright, totally out-of-the box, the author of long articulate letters back and forth before we married.

I was powerless.

In his song “Galway Girl”, Steve Earl asks: “what's a fella to do?

Because her hair was black and her eyes were blue”

It’s like that, only with Carla it was freckles on her knees and hair that smelled Ivory soap.