All the Information I Need

Foreboding

Have you ever been walking along and then spotted someone or something and realized you had a dream about it the night before? It just happened to me. I was walking through the grocery store at lunch time and did a double take as I glanced past an end display of condiments. I realized right away that I had a very profound dream last night, somehow involving steak sauce.

In my dream, someone, and I can't remember who, was talking to me in a very deliberate tone and whatever they had been saying, finished it with, "...and don't forget to bring the steak sauce." And then they walked away.

The only other thing I remember, is me saying, "Wait! What brand? WHAT BRAND????". I got no answer.

It's left me feeling very unsettled ever since.

Happy Birthday to Me

This picture could easily been labeled, "Looking for my lost keys". Happily, it wasn't the case. Instead, it was another birthday spent together picking apples. A little colder than in years past, but no less fun. Thanks go to the whole family for making the time for us all to be together.

Morning Commute

For the first time in all of my years of commuting, I saw what looked like a dead bear on the side of the highway. Between the lifting darkness of the early morning, the dense fog, and me driving eighty miles an hour, it was a little hard to tell. I suppose it could have been a blanket or a wad of fabric that blew off of someones car, but then, why was there a policeman stopped and standing over it? Then again, it could have been someones body, that for some odd reason, was lying at the edge of the median along the interstate.
Strange that they would be wearing a heavy fir coat on such a mild morning, but hey, who am I to judge?

Soup's On

There's something about the smell of hot vegetable soup, drifting up from the lunchroom on a certain kind of chilly and rainy day. It's a smell that takes me back to my old elementary school cafeteria. Good old Harris School- where years of my youth were spent trying get through life without being noticed...usually ending in abject failure.

It started in kindergarten, with my earliest recalled public humiliation being the day I fell asleep during nap-time on a section of the large, horseshoe shaped window seat. I awoke to see the rest of the class sitting on the remainder of the semi-circle- staring at me. I have a vague recollection of trying to come up with some lame excuse, like I wasn't really asleep. But I'm sure this only helped to label me as not only lazy, but a liar as well.

It was only the first of many more incidents to follow: getting called out in the cafeteria by my teacher for not finishing the so called "chipped beef", screaming out an oral report in third grade with the teacher at the back of the room continually raising her hand because I "wasn't being loud enough", having to stand up and sing a solo at a "Glee Club" rehearsal (which, by the way, God only knows why I was in Glee Club- either it must have been required, or the alternative was likely a sports activity- which held the potential for even greater humiliation),  or having to put our "fun" art project up on the wall at the front of the classroom (which in my case was a self portrait), so it could be brutally critiqued by my "colleagues".

The list goes on and on... all the way up to, and including, the very last day of sixth grade, when I broke my arm at recess. No doubt this, like all of the other infractions before it, went into the scrapbook they called "My Permanent Record"- which served as a repository for all of my failings and personality flaws that were collected during the years of my incarceration.

All these memories and more come rushing back to me as I stand in the cold air at the stairs outside of the break room and take in the smell of the vegetable soup.

God, I hate that smell.