This is the most snow we’ve ever gotten here in your lifetime, I told Gamma.
She nodded solemly. Then she plopped back down into the snow and swam. She invited me to join her. I said sorry, I have to go into town now for a therapist appointment.
Almost two feet of snow in just a few hours during the night. I took the next day off to shovel our our house and the inlaws’, so that they could go home again and stop staying at our house.
I told my therapist they were staying with us. I told him he’d probably find it fascinating, from a professional viewpoint.
Today Alpha and I were at the airport to see off Beta. Got a couple hugs out of it. Waved. Got lost on the way home. Alpha made the mistake of following me and got lost too and I let her go around me and followed her for a while until I was back on track.
The kid’s plane hasn’t even landed and I already feel weird.
See the progress I’m making? Getting in touch with my feelings? How do you feel, Mig?
Weird. I feel weird.
Very good. Expand.
No matter what else I’m doing, I’m standing low on University Avenue in Seattle looking uphill past the University Book Store. It is summer. This image is superimposed over whatever else I’m doing. A dream, during the day.
A daydream.
That’s not what I said. I said University Avenue looking uphill in summer, and also I feel as if a lion has been extracted from my spine. And now I see the parking lot behind the bookstore.
I see.
And a small plane flying low over Lake Union. Getting ready to land. So hopefully it’s a seaplane. I used to work at a bank in Seattle and they demolished a building across the street but I didn’t see it happen. Just came to work one Monday morning and a few windows were broken.
I see. Go on.
My wife remembers snow like this from back when she was Gamma’s age or so. This is one of those snowfalls you remember.
O, the anxiety.
Be careful hauling that harp all across kingdom come.
Oh, right. Forgot to mention that: we’ve come to our senses and postponed that trip on account of this weekend heavy snows are predicted in that part of Europe (Alps) as well as school-vacation begins that weekend in Holland, parts of Germany and Austria, and, eh, France. And that being a ski area, roads would be snowy and jammed. So we just thought, Beta can wait until early March for her harp. She’ll be busy and distracted the first month anyway.
my computer died so we’re replacing the parts that need replacing, and it was suggested that i step up and get a better memory while i was at it. a better memory capacity. i’m still in the place where i both realize that the joke has been done to death and think it’s funny anyway.
your memory seems okay, though. no need for an upgrade when you’re conjuring summer in the middle of a snowstorm that you’re going to remember when the sun is driving the rivulets down your lion-less back, in july or august.
You mean our blizzard made it all the way to Austria?
Now THAT’s a storm, dude!
Psst.
looks like you got enough material there to last you for a couple of months. Good jebus, my therapy just sounds like me, whining. something to be said for sublimation, I think.
I like this post.
When you are lookin up University Avenue, this isn’t a flashback to when you and I and Mike (whatever happened to him?) drank 3 pitchers of beer each while wandering from bar to bar? Nah, I only remember that vaguely as well..
Wait: was that a normal old gutteral-howling veldt-ruling lion, or a mechanical lion?
http://www.mnftiu.cc/mnftiu.cc/war8.html
Did it feel good or bad to have the lion out of your spine? ‘Cause I can see that going either way. Me, I could maybe do with invoking a spine-lion once in a while.
dear old college buddy, may be a flashback, a memory long buried by alcohol finally bobbing to the surface like… like a mob hit victim off the jersey shore or something. no idea what happened to mike, haven’t heard from him in what, 20 years or something. or almost.
jessica, it is the feeling of the absence of a lion in my back. it is an empty, lion-less feeling. i couldn’t call it pleasant, or a feeling of relief, because i did not have the corresponding feeling of a lion being there before.
and there is a badger in my stomach. if it would be gone, now that would be a relief.