Lightnin’ bugs

Tonight, as I was doing a breathing treatment and watching episode 3 of Pure for the third or fourth time, the power went off.  As my luck goes, both batteries for my portable oxygen concentrator were dead and so was my car battery.  Well, damn. No oxygen, no air conditioning, and NO INTERNET! Oh, the humanity!

I placed a quick call to the electric company to report the outage and noticed I only had 21% battery power left on my phone.

Am I going to die tonight?

I called my rescue squad and they were here in ten minutes.  They jumped my battery and followed me to the gas station. (Yes, almost out of gas, too.)

Back at home now, and I have been sitting in the car with it running for an hour or so.  I was reflecting on the recent events when I saw something that calmed and grounded me: lightning bugs. Fireflies. Lots of them. Survivors that have avoided the toxins of summer pesticides to become tiny beacons announcing their presence silently.

Many years ago, my best friend and I laid on the hood of her mom’s car and watched fireflies and talked about heaven, debating what it must look like and where it was. “I think it is beyond the stars”, she said. “I think what we see is a giant window shade with pinholes in it. Those are the stars we see and behind that, is light and heaven.”  “Yeah”, I replied. That’s all I could say.  It was mid-August, a week or so after her birthday and we had smoked her birthday weed and now was staring up at a giant window curtain full of pin holes pondering serious things like heaven and how does that lightning bug know when to flash its butt? Do they have rules about that or take turns flashing?  We reckoned there must be a lightning bug law of flashing among them.

And then I saw a falling star. And another. And the longer we laid there, the more frequent they fell. We stayed there for hours, trying to count them and arguing about the numbers then laughing so loud her mom came out and shushed us.

I fell asleep under those falling stars and lightning bugs, content that heaven is real but not necessarily “up there“.  Heaven is where you are.

My friend has been dead thirty years and I hope she found her heaven beyond the window shade among the stars.

Hug your friends. Make a memory. Charge your batteries.

~K.

Rocky Mountain High

Just like yesterday or the day before, I stumbled backward again. This time it was a yearning to listen to John Denver. Today I happened to be somewhere that sold CDs and there happened to be a John Denver boxed set, and I happened to pick it up and it got into my shopping cart. Somehow.

Tonight, I happened to remember to retrieve it from the shopping bag and began listening to it. It took one disk of the three-disk set to satisfy my need for John Denver. The rest of the songs in the set are unfamiliar to me. They are nice and enjoyable but they are not songs I know. So the joy of singing along and traveling back in time was over after oh, say 45 minutes.

The songs I do know, “Rocky Mountain High” (with possibly the most profound line of lyric I had ever heard during my teen years: “He was born in the summer of his twenty-seventh year / coming home to a place he’d never been before” Dude. That’s deep),  “Take Me Home Country Roads” and “Back Home Again” among others took me back some 35+ years to a time when there were no bills, no mortgage or rent, no incurable disease or aging body and no middle-aged panic over living the remainder of my life alone.

Still can’t help closing my eyes and swooning to “Annie’s Song” and thinking afterward that John Denver caused me and possibly others some disappointment with that song, because we found no romance as alive and intense to give us what he describes in the song.

“Let me drown in your laughter, let me die in your arms…”

*Sigh*

I am not too old to dream of a romantic love that renders me helpless and oblivious to the surrounding world and a love that can sustain me in even the direst straits.

In my next life, I hope that a love like that finds me.

~K

Goodbye Yellow Brick Road*

*and other misconceptions of my youth

Played the album today and was INSTANTLY transported back to my parents’ living room in Konawa, OK, seated cross-legged on the floor with Lani in front of my mom’s ginormous console stereo that was mostly cabinet and very little oomph.  Geebus, that thing probably only had 3 x 5 speakers and NO DETECTABLE BASS. That didn’t keep me from trying to urge some thump from it when the folks were gone, however. And although decidedly small, those speakers were hardcore because they never blew.
Listening today, I recalled every single lyric to each song and felt much the same way I did back in nineteen-seventy-cough. To clarify, I was listening to the CD version of the album; the vinyl version with all its fantastic artwork is long gone. I would purchase it again just for the art.
There are probably only a handful of people my age who are NOT familiar with the album. You either love it or you don’t and you suck if you don’t. For me, in addition to the title song and the other that got a lot of airplay,  two songs stand out: “This Song Has No Title” and “I’ve Seen That Movie Too”, but the entire album is great.

Every. Song. Is. Good.

Enough said. (Except that I have edited this post at least 10 times. Someone keeps coming by stealing my “e”s )

~k