One More Thing

I had my share of trouble falling asleep last night. Just that surplus of adrenaline after eleven; overflow of ideas. Last night it was because I had a ridiculous notion for incorporating a medal system, Olympics-style, into major league baseball, based on pure accumulative statistics during the regular season, in addition to the World Series trophy. Completely useless diagrams in my head. Once, I was so bothered by the lack of coordination and efficiency of the teller program at my bank – I learned from experience – that I penned out a completely new base of intricate operations until two o’clock in the morning.
Mental?
Uh oh. Looks like someone broke into that healthy anti-oxidant dark chocolate bar of caffeine after seven o’clock in the evening.
But the Bear was also distracting me with ideas of father-son activities for this fall, like tent-camping with Puck, or…
“I want to go to Space Camp!”
Sometimes, I married a kid. Then he talked about running into an old choir pal at Starbuck’s that night, whose little brother is named Stoney.
“Is that not the most awesome name ever, or what?” he asked. “I mean, he’s named after a rock… You should start calling me a rock name. Maybe ‘Pumice’… No, I should be ‘Black Granite’.”
Do you see the problem here?
Then when I was on the edge of truly conking…
BOING… reverberations… reverberations… reverberations…
12:28 AM.
“Was that a mattress spring?” I garbled.
Ug… zzzzz….

This morning, I completed more conversation with Mom via phone about Francis’ CLEP exam program for the fall in coordination with MIZZOU’s Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering program acceptance policies…
Rad Wednesday morning.

Puck was just as inspired as ever. In the afternoon he had constructed a “floating machine for The Borrowers if there are any, but there aren’t” composed of empty (clean) milk jug, paint can opener, and leather cord from the zipper of my moccasin. To console his imagination, I suggested the idea that we don’t know about all living creatures yet. Things you can’t see. Things inside the Earth. He was intrigued. He also was fascinated with my sixteen year-old cargo-pocket Bible, which he added to his endless stash, until he sat on it by mistake.
“What is going on here? Have I been laying on the Holy Word? Huh. I’d better take care of this baby.”

The Bear joined us for Caesar salads at six to discuss Greek textbooks.
And thunder in the near west before ten.

Thought of the Day

In my seven year-old tangerine canvas book bag, I carry in the front zippered pouch a tiny orange plastic doll’s plate. One of those Playmobil pieces from the original Victorian dollhouse my sister and I got as a joint Christmas present in the 90’s. [Why anyone wanted to give the sister who actually thought she would one day transform into a cowboy — yes a cow-boy — a dollhouse, I could never quite figure out…] It arrived squeaky new with full orange dishware set for the kitchen. All these years later, at least one plate remains.
Anyway, that tiny scrap of plastic is… it’s sort of a reminder of those old days. I carry it around because it’s a tap back into that realization that I think too much.
I’ve always liked tiny things.
Maybe that’s why the one time I ended up in the emergency room it was the result of a miniature bubble gum machine. Again, another story… I would make tiny things, collect tiny things, dream tiny things. Make stories of tiny things. Everything was better, shrunk.
Sometimes during long prayers, my head would think up tiny things. Little baskets filled with yellow peaches. Miniature china dishes… things that fit into a Lilliputian house where I could live in my mind.
Yes, I did have friends.
Any afternoon I could grab, I’d ride my “black cherry” bike (that was the color of the sparkling finish), up and down the dead-end street in front of the house. Over and over and over. Thinking up stories in my head about other worlds and planets in strange colors and places that don’t exist at all.
“Strange kid.”
Thinking those kinds of things was like my own version of adrenaline junkie. I’d sort of get this warm chill up my spine — like sitting in my grandpa’s gazebo in a warm breeze after a cool dunk in the pool. I think it’s because I’ve always — like many — gotten some sort of deep happiness out of seeing, or thinking, something beautiful.
“Hippie.”
Maybe that’s why I invented this apparatus called “The Messy Shape Turner” when I was six. Basically the expanded version of the Tardis, for all you old-time British sci-fi nerds. In the Messy Shape Turner, any world could be created, and anything in that world could be created. Anything the mind could invent. Every neutrino held a quintillion other things, and all those things contained a quintillion other things. An infinity of possibilities.
I don’t know. Maybe I was an “odd child”, the kind they turn out of gothic novels — scrappy gray-clad girl with dirty hair and eyes too big for her face — or maybe I was just on the sightly peculiar side of the late 80’s. Who knows. At least I can claim to possess some kind of imagination.
“Weirdo.”
That’s all I’ve got at the moment.