Reinvented Myself
I have reinvented myself so many times I am not sure who I am looking like anymore. I had been trying to discover who I am. I would just try new things to see what stuck. I have to say the view on the way out looks a lot different than on the way in. You spend so many years trying to assemble what you think your life should be and then within a matter of seconds it disassembles in front of you.
Your memory is filled with trivial thoughts. Like the time I had a broken bone in my wrist and a dislocated shoulder so had a very large cast on me. These were the days they were made out of plaster. I remember when Buzz Aldrin and the other astronaut walked on the moon. It was like they time traveled in this spaceship to another universe. I suppose they did. Your father was in the Army, several lines of military men in his family. He put being a soldier before anything else, even us at times. I can still vividly see him riding in the back of a convertible car for the labor day parade in 1965. There was this traffic jam from the festivities because they had to block off several roads. I loved him so much, it hurt. Sometimes we forgot about that when we got sucked into the rat race of life. But every day with him was like I had won a prize.
I am sorry this entry is so clunky, I am having writer’s block. My mind keeps going back to your Uncle Jimmy, my younger brother who spent most of his life as an inmate in the state penitentiary, confined to a 6x6 room in a never ending block of cells. He had disappeared for some months before he was caught. They said addiction got the better of him. I think you would have liked him though. He was definitely fun to be around. One time we went out for waffles, I have never seen someone put so much whipped cream on their waffles. I was there to pick him up the day he was released, he was never the same though. He didn’t talk about his time in jail and we didn’t press him on it. Something just shifted in him when he was a teenager. After the drugs and time in jail, he was a different person as well.
I am feeling tired from my chemo treatment, I will write more again tomorrow. I hope this note on the sheet of your life doesn’t define you.