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.

Our Vacation, Epilogue

Photographic proof of nothing but non-stop fun at scenic  

Cape Cod, Massachusetts:

Our Vacation, Part Ten

By rights, we could stay one more night at the Cape. But years ago, we found it wasn't worth it. By the end of vacation, we're all tired and ready to head home. The times we stayed the extra night, we found that between being pushed to pack up and leave by check-out time, and the nightmarish traffic, it made an already grueling trip that much worse.

Back at the old cottage, when the kids were little, we would walk down to the end of the road, down some timber stairs and visit the pond we never swam in- just to say goodbye before we left. This is the same pond we would say hello to when we first arrived. After that goodbye visit, we would finish packing up the van- which back then meant cramming it full of all the crap we bought- mostly at every Christmas Tree Shop on the Cape, before heading out. On our way, we  would stop to eat out before going home.

This year was a little different. This year, we made an attempt to go to Mayflower Beach in the morning  before leaving. Even though we left at what would be the usual time to go to our beach, apparently this is way too late if you want to go to the Mayflower Beach. Traffic was backed up all the way down the road and was being diverted away from the parking lot. This happens at our beach too, but usually not until mid-morning or so.

Since Mayflower was out of the question, we backtracked the couple of miles to our usual beach, where we spent the next couple of hours with just our towels and no tent. It felt weird not to have the tent with us. It felt like we snuck away without an old friend. But we were traveling light and didn't intend to be there long. And we weren't.

It was turning out to be a beautiful day, but we were ready to go home. There was one last, brief stop at the Pottery Place, before we headed back to the cottage to finish packing up.

The roof carrier that looked so deflated when we left for our vacation was now straining against the zippers, trying to burst open. The back of the van was loaded, not only with our luggage, but also the remaining food and about four tons of private real estate, in the form of rocks that we collected from the beach. We barely managed to close the back of the van and somehow squeezed everybody in, before leaving to return the key to the cottage.

This year there was no stopping at the restaurant as in years past. Like so many other places, the restaurant we used to go to was no longer there. Instead, since we realized we had about six cubic inches of free space that we hadn't anticipated, we made another stop at a Christmas Tree Shop. It seems there was some one of a kind hand lotion that they might have and since we had just about enough space to accommodate a bottle of hand lotion, this made perfect sense. Unfortunately, they didn't have any, so for good measure, we stopped one more time at Barnes and Nobel, just because that lotion-size empty space in the back of the van was bothering us, and we figured, why not plug it with a book instead? Once that had been taken care of, we got gas and headed home.

Not eating at a restaurant before we left the Cape meant that we were leaving slightly earlier than usual. This also meant that we didn't hit the crush of rush hour traffic at our usual hour into the trip. Instead, we hit it at about an hour and three quarters into the trip. This happened at the more convenient, "You feel you're so close to home, and a bathroom, that you can almost taste it" time (taste home, that is, not the bathroom). But it would be another hour and a half or so before we finally arrived into town.

It always seems a little strange getting back home after we've been away. Entering the closed up house, it feels cooler than normal. Going through the stack of mail can be both exciting and depressing. When the kids were younger, they would dig through to see if their class assignments had arrived for the soon to begin school year. That's another one of those things that was a long time ago.

Unloading the car takes so much less time than loading it, especially when you have so much help. Luggage and mementos and rocks are shuttled into various locations in and out of the house. And laundry, tons and tons of laundry, gets stacked against the washer where it will be whittled down little by little over the coming week(s).

The nice thing about leaving early and getting home on a Friday is that you have a whole weekend ahead of you; a whole weekend to mow your lawn and pay bills and go grocery shopping and to get back to the reality of what your life is really about. It gives you time to deal with the anxiety of having to go back to work in a few days, and the time to reflect on the week you just had, and to think about just how lucky you were to have had it. But mostly, it gives you the time to slow down a little for the first time since you left. And it gives you the time to go through all the of the pictures you took while you were on vacation, so you can figure out just what it was you did the past week and why it was so great.