There is so much news to share about my family, experiences and work, that it may be difficult to begin, like when I am gripping the phone to my ear, waiting to speak to an old friend I have not spoken to in months, or years even. What am I supposed to tell him, when he asks what’s new? What is the priority topic?
For Spring Break, my family and I visited Grandma and Grandpa in Florida. My mom is the resident park ranger at Cayo Costa State Park, an island located just off the Florida Gulf Coast, where we stopped one day.
Well, I just got home from the store and need to unload a few grocery items. I am about to head with Elia and the kids to attend a family doctor check-up. After the doctor, I need to replace a few burnt out light bulbs and then tighten a few loose screws on the mini-crib. So, how about them Royals? Oh, hey, I hear that the eclectic band with the distinct musical style is touring again this summer. I haven’t been to a rock concert in ages.
Grandpa recently replaced his sailboat with a fishing boat. While he says it was done to save him time spent on boat maintenance, I think it was done to further his enjoyment of the ocean breeze as he races from island to coast.
Of course, plenty of exciting moments can be shared with everyone at the right time. I just decided that I would wait to speak with certain people until we both have a few days to go backward and forward in time, until we are all free to talk without reproach, until we have a chance to thoroughly explain exactly how we made it to this point. In other words, it might be a few decades. I mean, we could simply wait until retirement, while on vacation on a houseboat in the middle a clear lake somewhere in Nevada. Or, we could wait until the afterlife. Then we will have plenty of time to catch up.
Cayo Costa is an island with numerous meandering trails slashing through the tropical wilderness.
There are people I would not mind catching up with, but I would be happy to wait until after retirement. I have actually been thinking of several conversations I would like to have with some people who had a sort of influence on my life, but I can wait a lot longer. I refer to these future chats as conversations to take place in the afterlife. Because, you know, it would really be too much of a challenge to schedule a time to speak with them before then, whenever we would both have a moment to spare, be at the right place at the right time. For all I know, they are already waiting for me in the afterlife.
Teen Idol of Dubious Qualification
I am actually looking forward to talking to some people I never got to talk to in life, like Mr. Glen Danzig. I went to a concert of his one night during my late teenage years. I would like to run into him in the afterlife, perhaps over a cup of coffee. I will ask him about the time, during his performance of Twist of Cain, when he looked out into the mob and made eye contact with an enraged teenager, shrieking, scowling and smoking himself hoarse. I will ask him if he thanked God for reaching yet another soul and connecting with the passion of defiance, anarchy and insanity? You never know. I also wonder if maybe he will seek me out for feedback on what I thought of the performance. We will have plenty of time to discuss it.
Middle School Bully
You know, actually, I have, relatively speaking, a lot of patience. I can wait until the afterlife before talking, for example, to my grade school bully, should we both occupy the same territory within the afterlife. When I have a chance, as in whenever I have an infinite number of moments to spare, I will seek him out, remind him that he gave me quite a difficult time in middle school. In the afterlife, I imagine we will all have a perfect memory, whether we like it or not, as we will likely be held accountable for each decision we ever made. My grade school bully will remember that morning when he and 10 of his cohorts surrounded me in an empty hallway before school, smelling of cigarettes and lacking in bathing experience. And then I will add that if it would have just been him alone, I still would have told him that I did not want to fight him. But if my grade school bully had insisted in a fight, I certainly would have crushed him, as he was several inches shorter and significantly weaker than I. I am sure he would have to agree. By the way, his scrawny come-along’s attempt to trip me as I walked away was pitiful. Where is this pitiful pal now, anyway? I suppose it could have been a lot worse (Bullied Kid Guns Down Classmates).
And then I would ask him what was going through his mind when he and his fellow toughie agreed to challenge my friend and me to a game of tackle football, a game that he never played, a game my friend and I had been playing since we were out of diapers. I wonder, especially after both of them were body-slammed into the dirt again and again. We will both have a good laugh then, and that will be about it. Well, I will probably admit that I might have appeared to deserve being picked on to a certain extent, and I might say that what I put up with helped me later in life to be react more quickly, decisively, forcefully, and with justice.
Driver Who Cut Me Off
Some of these conversations will be very interesting, though short. There are countless apologies I will have to make to people I cut off while rushing on the freeway to what will have ended up being an overwhelmingly insignificant destination. I misunderstood that in the apparent absence of courtesy on the Southern Californian interstate, I was not actually licensed to be a jerk. It was my fault, and I now realize that my actions, even if they had been more respectful of the space of my fellow drivers, would not have had even the slightest ripple effect that would have made much of a difference, as we are all here enjoying the afterlife now.
By the way, here is an interesting story about one driver who was rescued by another driver who probably cut her off (Woman Rescues Driver She Cut Off).
The Road Less Traveled
Probably many of the infinity of conversations will take place with my family and friends, playing what-if games and exploring scenarios to their various possible outcomes. For instance, remember that rainy evening when we were 9 years old? What if we had taken that idea of creating a ding-dong ditch video game by typing a program on my Atari 400, and, right then and there, made it a reality… instead of giving up after 10 minutes of brainstorming and 2 minutes of thumbing through the programming manual. We might have invented a novel, entertaining game that we could have refined, marketed to our friends, and eventually sold to hundreds, maybe thousands of kids, across multiple platforms, namely Atari, ColecoVision, and Nintendo. And then, later, we could have rolled out an adventure series, DingDongDitchQuest for the PC. We would then, in the afterlife, be discussing our early retirement as young gaming corporation tycoons.
Or, we could have been truck drivers, really, owned trucking companies and commanded fleets of big rigs, speaking to each other in CB code. You got your ears on? Good. Let’s talk for awhile about how we would have been the most bad ass of truck drivers.
Seb is at the age now where he is considering several possible career paths: professional candy taster, pancake chef, trained model builder, and, now, professional quad racer. I am sure Uncle Kyle will also have some suggestions on which field to consider.
The Meandering Sidewalk 