Thursday Thoughts & Things

First and foremost, a very happy 19th birthday to my baby who is up in Ontario and - as best I can tell - planning on staying there as long as she possibly can.  This is the second year in a row that Jamie hasn't been around for her birthday as she was up in Manitoba last year for her 18th and I missed her last year just as I'll miss her again this year. I'm not going to lie - even though I do miss her and wish she were home, I don't miss the constant arguing that she and Amanda seemed to want to engage in.  It would have been great if Jamie had been home for her birthday but she's technically an adult now and can make her own decision on where she wants to live.  Not that I ever thought it would be Canada though!  Anyhow, I'm hoping to take a trip up that way to see her soon and to bring her a few of her things and hopefully we'll be able to celebrate her birthday then - belatedly but better late than never!  In the meantime Jamie - happy birthday!  I hope you do something special for you today and have cake - ya gotta have cake on your birthday!

Secondly, yesterday marked the 6th anniversary of my blog which for some reason, I thought was the 5th anniversary!  Just goes to show how much attention I've been paying to this particular blog lately!  I've been a little swamped (overwhelmed?) with trying to keep up with "Travels With Nathaniel" and occasionally tossing something new up at "The Distracted Wanderer" in between work and everything else so this blog has sort of taken a backseat lately.  That's not to say that I don't think about posting over here - I just never seem to get the time!  Hand-in-hand with that is visiting other blogs as lately there just do not seem to be enough hours in the day!  Trust me, I do miss all of you and try to get around at least once a week but some weeks are gone before I even know it so please forgive me if I am absent more than I'm present.

A quick side note on this blog, I have decided to start doing the occasional paid post again as an offer was made and it was quite reasonable and a little extra money for wandering never hurts. Please feel free to ignore those posts, it will probably be quite easy to see which ones are the paid ones as they are going to be for travel destinations that I've probably never even heard of - never mind been to!  Unless of course I post about someplace you've been to - in that case, feel free to chime in!

Finally, in spite of all that's been going on lately - and it's been a lot it seems - Cyndi has been uppermost in my mind quite a bit.  I seem to be having more times when I get the urge to call her than before and every time I realize that she's no longer there, it still comes back and hits me upside the heart a little bit.  I was having coffee at work the other day out of my beloved Cancun coffee cup that she got me and out of nowhere I found I had a big ol' lump in my throat. Then today, while driving back from dropping Amanda at a friend's house in Quincy, Massachusetts yesterday evening I had lots of time to think and sure enough, Cyndi was there in the forefront of those thoughts.

I'd like to think that maybe she's up there watching over me a little bit though if I know her and the Mama Bear that she always was, she's up there watching over Daniel like a hawk (after all, that was her last name!) and making sure that they're treating him right at the home he's in.  I suspect she takes the occasional side glance to see how Angela is doing but as Angela received her Doctorate in History before Cyndi died, I'm pretty sure she's not too worried about her daughter who has always had a really good head on her shoulders. She most definitely took after her Mom!

Anyhow, with all of that thinking about my old friend and missing the heck out of her, it really came as no surprise that when I went back to look at my very first post on this blog, there was a comment from her.  Cyndi didn't comment often but when she did, it was always a gift and I'm so glad that I've got those little gifts scattered here and there throughout the last six years of writing.  I just so wish I had been able to talk her into her own blog but alas, she always felt like she never had anything all that important to say.  Well heck, it never stopped me!  

A happy Thursday to all! 

Moments of Melancholia

One week ago today I boarded the return flight for my trip home to Connecticut from California - the first half of the flight taking me from Sacramento to Minneapolis via Northwest Airlines. I wasn't anywhere near as nervous as I was when I boarded the flight in Philadelphia to take me westward bound. Instead I was somewhat pensive - ruminative if you prefer.

My trip to California had been a wonderful time and a break that I really needed as I could tell that the stresses of my job were piling up around me a little too high for my liking and I needed to get away for a bit. The six days that I spent in Stockton were good for me as they gave me a chance to do something for myself - to relax, to revisit parts of my past, and to reconnect with Cyndi and Grandma Edith - two people who are very important in my life. My trip afforded me the chance to meet four more wonderful people - Sandee and Zane and Katherine and her man; to pay respects at the grave of a fallen friend; to see how Stockton had grown and how it was attempting to revitalize; and the chance to fall back, regroup, and recharge the batteries a bit. All good things.

What my trip didn't provide me - and there are those of you who have asked about this - was a chance to speak to the person from my past who has always been, and will always be, special to me. After asking what you all thought, I did send him an email informing him of where I would be and how to contact me should he desire to do so but I had the distinct feeling when I sent it that it was going to go unanswered. Call it a hunch, call it intuition, call it knowing this guy pretty well even after not speaking to him for six years. I would have been pleasantly surprised had he actually contacted me but I was bound and determined not to be disappointed if he didn't.

He didn't but I didn't let that dampen my happiness of being back in Stockton and spending time with my best friend. My seeing him or speaking to him was never the basis of my going to Stockton to begin with even though I can't be in that city without, as Cyndi says, "all the triggers being there." That didn't mean I had to let those triggers screw up my vacation and I didn't. I didn't even think much about the whole thing until the time I boarded my flight home, sat down in my seat, and watched California grow smaller as we climbed to 36,000 feet on our way East.

The problem is that I think too much on airplanes. There isn't a whole lot else to do when you're susceptible to motion sickness and can't read books so as I listened to the songs on my iPod shuffle through their rotation, the thought occurred to me that I should be proud of myself as I had just spent almost an entire week in Stockton - land of major heartache for me - and I hadn't even come close to crying once. I had no sooner finished that thought when next thing I knew my eyes had filled with unbidden tears. Oh good Lord, I wasn't going to cry in front of a plane full of strangers, was I?

A feeling of melancholy seemed to drop down on me much like the oxygen masks in the overhead bins would drop down should there be a sudden change in cabin pressure but the only change in pressure was in my heart as I felt it grow heavy under the knowledge that I now knew for sure that I no longer meant a thing to the man I can no more remove from my heart than I can remove that heart and continue to live. Oh sure, I had a feeling I had ceased to exist six years ago but there's that whole "hope springs eternal" stuff and I guess the least cynical part of me had hung onto that tiny shred of hope in spite of the rest of me knowing better.

There is nothing worse than telling yourself "I told you so" but I spent most of the trip between Sacramento and Minneapolis telling myself that very thing over and over as I beat myself up with it hoping that eventually I'd be lucky enough to beat it right out of me. Logic told me I had no reason to be sad or melancholy while common sense told me to take a big get-over-it pill and move the heck on but sometimes logic and common sense are useless tools - especially in matters of the heart.

When we landed in Minneapolis, I called Cyndi to let her know that I had made it safely through the first part of my trip home and, because she's a good friend and knows when I'm lower than the treads on my sneakers, she passed along words of support and encouragement as well as concern that this would set my heart back a few years. I assured her that it wouldn't, that I still believed in true love and romance though perhaps not for me, and that I'd be okay once I could wrap my head around being a non-person where a certain individual was concerned.

Shortly after I hung up, the second leg of my flight boarded and while the plane shuttled through the air at 500 mph heading towards home I came to grips with the situation, sucked it up, and managed to swallow that big get-over-it pill that common sense had been encouraging me to take. In all honesty, nothing had changed, things were still the same, and when I got back to Connecticut my life would continue just as it had before I took a much-needed break. The only difference was that I had no reason to say that I would never return to California, or Stockton in particular, as I faced the past head-on and was none the worse for wear because of it.

As for the song ... seems kind of self-explanatory even if not entirely accurate. I'll always care - I just won't always hurt.

This Nearly Was Mine ...

... or perhaps I should title this post "The Agony of Defeat"? Either way it's about loss and how that loss sticks with you even a day or two later. No, I'm not talking about love lost this time around, I'm talking about how $2,000 was snatched away from me last night at Bingo just as I was about to claim victory and at long last break my losing streak. My luck sucks ...

Normally when I go to Bingo with my mom and my aunt at the high stakes parlor at Foxwoods Resort & Casino, I don't ever come close to being able to yell out Bingo! Of course now that I think about it I wonder why they call it a resort as there's not a whole lot else to do there other than gamble unless you can sell your youngest child to afford the green fees at their Lake of Isles golf course but I digress ... back to last night ... Generally when I go to Bingo my cards aren't even in the game and the ink blots I make on them look more like scatter-shot rather than making up whatever pattern the game happens to be looking for. If it's a double postage stamp we're playing for I'll end up having postage due on every single card in front of me; if it's a picnic table pattern then my table is sorely lacking legs or a top; my wild pyramids look more like the garden mazes from the Court of Louis XIV; and I'd be better off drinking a six-pack rather than trying to form one on my card! When it comes to Bingo, I am a talentless - and luckless - hack but hope springs eternal and I always figure that my luck has got to change at some point, doesn't it??

Last night, though, my cards were actually playing quite well and I was in the game for once. I came close on just about every single cover-card "Quickie" (a misnomer if ever those was one as the caller is still about as slow as molasses on a winter day despite the fact they tout it as a "game for the advanced Bingo player") and I was "waiting" on several other games. In the world of Bingo "waiting" means that you only need a number or two to be able to yell out that one word that is valued above all others in a Bingo Hall. "Waiting" means you stand a chance, "not waiting" means you might as well file your nails while your cards sit there and mock you.

As I said, my cards were playing quite well last night and I was actually feeling pretty optimistic that I was finally going to be able to yell Bingo! after the long dry-spell that I've had since 1981 when I last yelled it out in the NCO Club at McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey and came home with $40 (which was a lot of money back then!). Things were most definitely looking good especially when it came to one of the big payout full-card cover-all games towards the end of the night. It was a progressive game where players first started out looking for a letter "X" and a letter "L" and then continued on for the full-card cover-all. If you can cover your card in 48 numbers or less the prize is $10,000 (my father actually won this game years ago and came home with the $10,000 - the biggest prize he ever won) but if no one covers the card in 48 numbers or less we then play on for a full-card cover-all consolation prize of $2,000. Not bad ... I could use $2,000 ...

On my sheet of nine cards I had several cards that were playing quite well but the letter "X" and then the letter "L" portions of the game were closed without my having completed either letter. That's okay because those portions of the game were only paying out $300 and I was going for the whole enchilada. No sense "wasting my win" on a smaller amount. The caller continued on and the card in the very middle of my sheet was playing very, very well. I only needed the numbers 1, 11, and 21 to cinch the thing and walk out of there with some of Foxwoods' money in my pocket.

"B-1". Yes! Only two numbers away -things were looking really good. "B-11" popped up on the TV monitors around the room and my pulse started to race a bit. In my mind I was thinking, "Come on I-21, you can do it!" However, my hopes were dashed as B-11 was called out (you can't just have the number displayed on the screen in order to win, it actually has to be called) and I heard someone else yell out Bingo!. What made it even worse was that the very number I needed - I-21 - was displayed on the TV monitors and would have been the very next number called if no one had called out Bingo! I couldn't even hope that whoever had called out was in error because he or she was playing on a video terminal and it's kind of hard to mess up when the %&*#'ing machine is doing all the work for you.

AUGH!!! I wanted to pound my head on the table or burst into tears as someone else made off with the $2,000 that was supposed to be mine. Why, oh why, do the Bingo Gods continue to mock me?? I managed to maintain my composure but it truly was the agony of defeat.

Even though it has absolutely nothing to do with losing at Bingo, the song "This Nearly Was Mine" from the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical South Pacific began playing in my head as I was driving home last night. Knowing that Jamie from Duward Discussion loves a good musical number, I decided to post it here along with this sad tale of loss! This particular version features the great, late Robert Goulet who I had the pleasure of seeing live in several plays, including this one, and who will always remain one of the greatest singers ever for me.


I might have lost at Bingo - yet again - but at least I got a good song out of the deal! Though I really could've used that $2,000 ...