When Did This Happen? 1 – The Setting
1 THE SETTING
As the dim steely-blue-gray light penetrated the window above the head of my bed, I crack one, then a second eyelid. I see the soft silhouettes of objects in my room with no comprehension. I struggle to awaken and my first thought was in the form of a question, “Why I was not running anymore like I did a few years earlier? It shouldn’t be too difficult to jump up, dress, get out and get running.” I also wish it is a few years earlier . . . I wish I could be a few years younger. Contemplating issues like running or simply just jumping out of bed is something I dwell upon lately. “Why don’t I do something about it?” That question prompts me to think about different places along my life’s path, and to contemplate those bumps on the road.
Thinking backwards, “Why didn’t I do sports in school? Was it because I wanted to spend more time pursuing girls?” Not really. I worked after school to pay for clothes, a car, and then dates with what little money was left over. I was young for the class and smaller than average. It did not appear I had any natural physical or mental inclination to be an athlete. Socially, I was a little awkward, later to be coined a “geek”, though I achieved modest successes at periodic relationships with girls back then.
I snap out of my backward thoughts, amble to the kitchen to grind coffee and feed it to our elaborate coffeemaker with many buttons and light-emitting diodes. The resultant product, my fresh ground coffee brew, will give me a boost of alertness for the Pacific Northwest freeway in the Pacific Northwest rain into which I was most immediately destined.
These days of the year are ubiquitously gray. So much so, we cannot really tell what month it is without recalling the actual month; “It’s November now?” Or reciting; “It is now February?” For there is no apparent difference between the two. One such year it started raining in October and it didn’t stop until mid-March. What a gloomy period, not only for the weather, but for a conglobulation of reasons. “Stop dwelling on it,” I command myself, aloud.
On a floating bridge of concrete that floats on a gray lake, beneath a gray sky, I try to keep an amount of safe space between the vehicle in front and my own. I do this in case I need to do a panic stop, but I try not to allow so much space that someone could take it away from me. But someone snuck in anyway. As my heart pounds an extra two beats, I project my complaint beyond the windshield, “We’re all trying to get to work at a reasonable time, buddy!” Soon following my moment of agitation, my thoughts go back to a time when this sky was blue and I was sailing on this lake. Sometimes after work, with friends, we would sail all night and watch the sun come up. When we would get back to work the next day, we would be wearing big smiles even though we bore no sleep.
