Lost Words

    When sleep is elusive, and even when it isn't, I need to have some things to think about before I fall asleep. My thoughts are in the form of words which build up until they need to be released in some form, and so I have my Blog. My first thoughts tonight were of last week's dream, where I heard Dave's voice speaking to me loud and clear. He spoke two simple words, or possibly three, but they meant nothing to me. I meant to remember them when I woke up, but they have eluded me. I only recall they were short words, and seemed to have the letters T and or Th. I still feel that they may come to me someday, but not now. 

  My mind then went to the bullshit column written by Chris Connell, which pretty much portrays Howard Hubbard as a child molester as well as an enabler. He's entitled to his opinion, but like many others, blocks any thinking from any other viewpoint. Who, he asks, wants to hear what Hubbard's defense is. "Whatever" he adds in dismissal.

   My words then form themselves into a memory of when as a very young child, I got very sick and told my mother I wanted to die. I actually remember speaking those words, and I guess I must have had some idea of what they meant. I thought my mother became angry at me for saying that, but at the time I meant it.

   We three kids were "playing toys."  That's what we called it when someone brought out our box of toys, a cardboard box that had an accumulation of hand-me-down parts and pieces that, combined with an assortment of animal figures and a few toy cars, were precious to us. Though I remember not liking what was used for roads, which were pieces of an Erector Set that Tommy Murray acquired when he worked for a time on a garbage truck in Troy. I disliked them because they were metallic and didn't seem to fit with our wooden blocks and little figures. But I realized they were the roads. Anyway, this day , as was our usual practice, there were the two options of play---For Real or Make-On.  My sister and I always followed the dictates of our older brother, as to what would be the  rules of the day. It was ordained we would be playing  For Real. So I arranged some blocks around my collection of little animals, a safe distance from that metal road. We played for a while, when all of a sudden my brother jumped his car over the road and started to change the play to Make-On.  I protested, uncharacteristically at the time, but my protests were ignored. Feeling abused, I retreated to the kitchen and sat on the floor beside the woodbox.

   On that wintry day, which must have been a Saturday as my father was home, my parents were going back and forth lugging in the wood from a tree that my father had cut down, most likely a dead tree unwanted by anyone else. I sat, chilled and sniffling, and tried to explain my plight and seek sympathy from my mother. She had no time for me, was busy working, hard work to be sure. But that all changed when I threw up in the woodbox. She instantly attended to  me, and I officially became sick.

   And I was deathly sick for what seemed a very long  time. I remember lying on the couch, too weak to walk, and not wanting to eat anything. Joseph and Dorothy, obviously now, coached by our mother, would come to the couch, eating something yummy they said, maybe cookies or such, and try to get me to eat some, but I didn't want anything. Dr. Sproat came and went several times. Maybe he left pills of some sort. Later my mother told me he had thought I had Vincent's Angina. I looked that up a while ago,and I think it's another name for trench mouth, a disease common among soldiers in wartime.  Anyway, I survived that one.