Just yesterday wasn’t I avoiding doing what I needed to do?
And today I’m taking pictures of the new beautiful blue manly coffee mug that my beautiful bride of forty-three and a half years bought for me at a local “Art Walk” in downtown Yuma, Arizona, along with a beautiful blue cereal bowl (not pictured here) made by a wonderful lady named “Angelina” who is going to teach our grandson Aron and me how to do ceramics.
All the while I’m discussing the lyric beauty of the now ancient poet musician Bruce Cockburn with a blogger friend of mine, Andreas Moser, aka “The Happy Hermit,” who is a lawyer in Germany when he actually IS in Germany because my friend wanders around the world taking pictures and writing stories about his wonderful vagabond travels, lawyering from anywhere in the world only when he has to. The Happy Hermit That’s us on the linked blog post discussing things at the end of years of comments on Moser’s F&Q post about divorce in Germany with me offering me and my beautiful bride and Bruce Cockburn’s song as a counter point to taking the easy way out.
After taking a photo of my new coffee mug and talking on the internet with a real live German, I noticed that “Big Brother” is probably watching me from my computer’s camera. Oh well, let him watch. He won’t see much of nothin’, huh?
Which is funny because my real-life big brother, Joe, who is ten years older than me and my life long biggest fan, always IS watching me. [“Hey, Bro!”]
Did I ever tell you about the time that my big brother took me to Game One of the 1977 World Series in New York City at the old Yankee Stadium when I was twenty and he had just turned thirty-one and had finally passed the goddamned Arizona State Bar Exam after five tries? I didn’t? Remind me to tell you that story here some time.
Here’s a picture of me and Joe when I was two and he was twelve. After our parents disappointingly twice brought home two sisters, first Mary and then Susan, my big brother finally got the little brother he’d been waiting for all his life! Then came our littlest sister, Kathy, so it was always just me and him against all those girls.
From our outfits, it must have been Easter Sunday at our house on Williams Air Force Base east of Chandler, Arizona, in 1959. Look how Joe is holding my hand with one hand and my Easter Sunday jacket with his other hand. It must have been warm that day, and I was probably getting a little cranky, therefore. It’s never taken much to make me cranky, probably because I was born a substance exposed infant. Did I ever tell you about that? No? Yes, I did. I’m sure that I did. Go back and read all the posts on this blog. You’ll find it in there somewhere. Wait! Here it is. War On Drugs
So, let’s recap here, shall we? I’m letting my mind wander where it will go to paraphrase Paul McCartney and John Lennon. Who? Oh GAWD! Whatever DO they teach in school these days? I’m also conversing with another soul on the other side of this planet, giving a shout out to the best big brother I’ve ever had, dropping the names of my sisters into this post too in case they read it, so I don’t get any shit for not doing so, and all the while strolling down memory lane and re-listening to Bruce Cockburn’s aptly-titled “State’s I’m In.”
“Ooo-Eee!” Getting to work for me is like “a drunk trying to shinny up a greased pole.” But WAIT! Who says I’m NOT doing “what I needed to do?”