The sun is shining today!

It has rained almost every day last week.  And when it rains, I'm tired, I'm moody and I'm just plain overall annoyed.  All I want to do is sleep.  Driving in the rain puts me at risk of entering autopilot mode - the wipers squeaking across the window...repeatedly...is what does it.  I'm unsure if this happens because it's a trigger or if it can be filed into the 'happens to everyone' pile.  Either way, I'm not sure what Mother Nature's problem is but she's cried buckets, drowning us all in the eastern states for the last several days with occasional, too-brief periods of reprieve. Brings me back to when I was a child and someone (for some reason, I cannot remember whom) told me that was because God was crying.  And I, being the extremely gullible child I was, would talk to God through the window and tell him that he needed to cheer up so that I could go ride my Strawberry Shortcake bike with the banana seat.    

Ahhhh, the days without electronic stimulation!  Remembering myself as being seven, eight years old always made me smile.  Briefly, but a smile regardless.

Having not much else to do because of inclement weather has forced me to think a lot about childhood days.  Mostly about the happier times.  I think there were a lot of contributing factors, really, other than my own boredom.  My own kids would never DREAM of doing the things I enjoyed when I was younger than they were.  No, they are far too fixated on their phones, their video game consoles, their iPads and any additional electronic devices that prevent them from being able to tell whether or not it's a nice day.  

I was a kid who loved going to the park on nice sunny days.  I loved the monkey bars...most all of New York City parks had a set.  They were the boxy, metal square ones at first, before the builders got more creative and started building sets out of heavy duty plastic.  I loved hurtling myself upside down and hanging like a bat until all of the blood rushed to my head, then doing a gymnastics-style roll/flip back onto my feet.  I loved turning cartwheels in the grass...this was something I was good at, apparently - while I'd never mastered a back handspring, I was pretty lithe and was able to perform both two-handed and one-handed cartwheels, splits, back bends.  I didn't fancy the slide too much - as those too were made out of metal back in the day and if it was summertime, we'd scald our asses along with the back of our legs going down without a towel or something to sit on.  There were also the old fashioned see-saws and you don't see those anywhere anymore.

Swinging was my favorite, though.  Some of my friends had back-yard swing sets and we'd swing as high as we could, until the poles came out of the ground, signaling to us that we'd best recognize our limits.  But in the park, the swing sets were welded into the ground and when there was no limit to how high we could swing, I'd go higher and higher until I was at risk of doing a 360...it felt as if I were flying.   There were times when I'd hold onto the chain links on either side and close my eyes, put my legs straight out in front of me, and lean backwards for an extended period of time.  Swinging while in that position would tickle my stomach.  I also remembered wondering what would happen if I were to let go of the chains.  I mean, I knew that I'd fall.  I wondered how much it would hurt.  Would a swinging midair hurl off of the seat kill me?  Luckily, I didn't investigate that any further since the thought scared me enough to outweigh what was likely childish curiosity.

Then there was the familiar melody of the ice-cream truck - Mr. Softee is still my favorite.  I always preferred soft ice cream to hard.  I never could hear jack shit, but I knew the SOUND of the Mr. Softee that would make hourly rounds.  The familiar horde of children that would run over to the park entrance whenever that sound came blaring through the speakers.  SOMETIMES, my mom would get us each a cone - depending on the mood she was in, of course, or whether she had a few singles on her.  

And sometimes, when it was REALLY hot outside, the sprinklers would be on, there was a little fenced-in pit with a drain where kids could run around in their bathing suits and keep cool while their mothers fanned themselves on a nearby bench.

Those are the memories shared by most 80's kids that lived in Brooklyn.  When it rained, if we were lucky, we had the original NES systems with Super Mario Brothers and Duck Hunt to keep us occupied, but for the most part, social media didn't exist and so we had to rely on nice weather in order to have any sort of fun on summer days.  Hell, some of these kids didn't give a shit about what the weather forecast said or whether or not God was crying - they went to the park ANYWAY.  

I'd tell my kids these things and get all sorts of 'are you crazy!?' looks.  But that's evolution, I guess...we're simply not in the 80's anymore.  Rain or shine, there they are with their phones, their tablets, video games...because who cares about the park?!  It's more important to follow the saga of who's going out, who's breaking up, who's sleeping with whom...it's not just my kids, though, so this is somewhat relieving.  It's just saddening, a little, to know they'll never love these things as much as I used to.  We're just from entirely different times.  Makes me wonder what things are going to be like when THEY become parents!  

There IS also a reason I'm mentioning these fond memories, I know I like to ramble and I thank y'all for bearing with me through all these novellas...LOL.

So...we also had (another) power outage last week.  It went on from Tuesday at about three-thirty in the afternoon until Thursday afternoon.  Two full days with no power.  Thankfully we weren't reliant on running the heat, otherwise we'd have been cold on top of temporarily living the Amish lifestyle.  

I'd been watching television when the storm hit and within a couple of minutes, we went dark.  We'd later learn it was because of a downed tree as a result of tornado-force winds in our area.  You can certainly imagine the kids' turmoil when nothing worked - at least until batteries were 100% depleted.  The wasband had power, though his went out for only a few hours before being restored.   And so for the sake of preserving whatever sanity I still possessed, I sent them over there until things were back up and running at my house.  Luckily, it wasn't like last time - when Snowmageddon wiped out our electricity for five days.  Still though, I cannot stress enough how much tree-inforcement is needed in these parts - the trees are tall and most are so dangerously close to power lines.  All it takes is strong winds and we're shit out of luck for however long it takes for the utility companies to come repair the lines.  But before they can come fix the lines, whatever tree that is lying on top of them has to be cut down and removed, making this a long, trying process in the Pocono Mountains.  And it's happened two times this year already - it being extended power outages.  

If there's anything I miss about city life, that's it.  We paid about as much as you'd pay for a kidney on the black market for electricity and gas, but THEIR outages (unless it was due to a hurricane) were only hours long at most.  Here?  A single flipping tree falls and BAM, 15K people in the dark for three days.  And whenever we have bad storms, that's multiplied many times over, resulting in a surge of restaurant activity and generator sales.  I seriously need a generator...when the power goes out, it takes the running water with it and we are completely, (pun intended here) powerless to function until restoration.

But as initially stated, that's about all I miss about the city.  Even though so many good memories were formulated there and it's where I spent the first twelve years of my life, I don't miss Brooklyn.  I don't even miss the park, and this is probably the saddest part of the whole thing.  Admittedly, the parks here are subpar in comparison and some don't even have swing sets! But my kids simply don't care much for them in general, as their brains have effectively been taken over by the invention of electronics and that thing called wi-fi that I, too, find myself in a state of panic without.  Mr. Softee, since he doesn't cover this area, has been replaced by Rita's - their gelati with vanilla custard with cherry ices in between is uh-mayyyyzing!!! (I won't put down the points value but I do know it for my own reference.)

And I'm thinking there's more to my wanting to close the door and put away these childhood memories that I once loved - because I've come to realize that there are not too many others in existence that effectively fill in the gaps in between.  Not full ones, anyway.  Just snippets here and there, of people I loved and are long since gone...gone before they could and perhaps would have been able to answer my questions about myself as a kid.  Questions that plague me now as an adult.  I also remember places I'd gone and visited, some smells, too.  I can recall little details here and there but not what I felt or experienced during these times.  I'm just more often left with more questions I started with, and so whenever something sends my mind on a throwback, I find myself shifting focus more onto the present and imagining alternate futures that would have otherwise stemmed from perhaps, a more stable childhood.  

I just stuggle with what could possibly have happened to cause these enormous, gaping holes in the canvas containing the events of my childhood?  I want to say that part of me is fine with not remembering the bad parts but I think I'd be lying to myself and to all of you if I said that I didn't want to eventually know the truth.  I know I'm a broken record about that sometimes, but it's simply not something that goes away.  I guess I just have to continue to be patient, I need to wait and see what unfolds with time, IF anything decides to reveal itself, it will be when when my brain allows for it.  It seems that most of my other happy memories came with a darker counterpart.  And this, I don't like at all.  For example, I remember my grandmother's house being a place where we gathered as a family and spent holidays - Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, etc.  And then I remember entering the house after she had died - feeling no remaining evidence of her warm presence.  No, all I felt was a blast of cold, with a side order of hatred toward my uncle who was now the sole owner.  And as I wrote about in a previous blog, this brought forth a rush of a new set of emotions that I'm STILL dealing with, years and years later.

In attempts to understand myself a little clearer, I try to picture an imaginary timeline of my childhood.  

It had all started out sunny and bright.  Flowers in bloom, birds singing, (even though I can't hear them, I can picture the little musical notes floating above in this vision) people smiling, myself and other kids playing, laughing, not having a care in the world.  

And little by little, the timeline weather begins to change.  It absolutely changes for all of us, for it's a part of life.  I'd imagine, as we mature and we transform from being children into teens and then eventually, adulthood, our 'timelines' do, too.  Because, as we grow, we have things to worry about - we have concerns.  We have responsibilities.  Some of us don't have secrets, though, like I feel that I did.  Secrets that even I don't know I had, buried deep inside that fun-loving child that exists only through these few clear memories, now.  

For me, though, watching my own particular timeline unfold, these imaginary skies gradually became cloudy and darkened earlier than it would someone who isn't riddled with suspicion or confusion about things having occurred during their childhoods - for me, there are black patches of a whole lot of nothing.  There are these obvious voids; bottomless swirling holes that I can't make sense of.  Most of them are indeed accompanied by little bits of information - enough for me to form a hypothesis, but not enough to get the full story...I HOPE this makes sense because I don't know how to explain it any better than through this analogy.  

But, yeah...they're there, right along with these occasional bright spots that I do recognize and I can smile about.  As I proceeded down (or up?) the timeline, they remained there, and even though things were cloudy, the imaginary sun still shone through and illuminated my path going forward.  It, however, shone bright enough for me to notice and subsequently, to skip over those black voids - because they simply weren't things that were going to be explained to me anytime soon.  Why sit there?  Why obsess over them?  Why peer into those holes?  I wasn't going to see anything.  In hindsight, I've tried, many times during the course of my thirty-nine years, to stop and peek into some of these holes and have always come up empty.

The rain came during puberty, as I faced unpleasant bodily changes and contended with hormones that I, as expected, didn't know how to deal with the inevitable transformation into adulthood.  Who does, though?  If you asked the younger, child-like me, I'd say that was when God started to cry a lot.  It started off with little droplets and occasional showers before the sky finally opened up following a sexual assault when I was seventeen.  That's when the torrential downpours began, often accompanied by thunder and lightening and otherwise frightening 'weather' in between the usual periods of sunshine (the good days) that would best represent the years I'd spend healing, rebuilding the me that my own personal weather conditions have battered over the years.  

Just like, in reality, while the bad weather occasionally batters someone's home, someone's property, causes wreckage and turmoil (power outages, hello!?) an emotional representation can also be successfully formed, at least for me.  Recovery reminds me of weather, in many ways.  There are good days.  Bad days.  Days where we want to be out and about be productive...and then there are days where we don't want to get out of bed and face the cruel, damp, dreary world.

It's just so, very easy (and at times, appropriate) for me to make these symbolic associations to my past, using rain, gloominess and cloudiness.  I think it's also why I appreciate sunny days more, now that I'm older.  I think it's safe to say that I weathered those teenage-year storms and now, only the childhood voids remain.  And there they will continue to remain until the time comes for them to reveal the information that is hidden in each.  

I do know that there are going to be many more rainy days to come.  That's to be expected of life.  Everyone's life, not just the lives of a survivor.  

(I know I don't need to explain to anyone here that sometimes it feels like MY life is more sullied, tarnished, tainted and at times, 'worse' than other 'normal' people's lives, when in fact, we know next to nothing of what that person deals with on a day-to-day....it FEELS like this at times, though!  This is just me venting, though - I know that these 'normal' people have their own crappy cards dealt at one point or another.) 

Even on these bad days, I make it a point to search for the smallest amount of 'sunlight,' little snippets of positivity that serve as reminders that there are indeed things to smile about regardless of shit weather, both metaphoric and real.  Reminders that even though so many question marks have been applied via (imaginary) Sharpie onto my envisioned timeline, there are still so, so many beautiful people, things, moments that I can stop to appreciate while I wait for the other things to make sense.  Kind of like enjoying the finer bits of life while waiting with a club in hand for the whack-a-mole creature to pop up out of whatever void it feels inclined to pop out of, first.  THEN, I'll hit this poor, unsuspecting mole (hope it's not a cat) on the head and see what unfolds.  It may decide to reveal what's in the gap from whence it came, or it may pop out of a different hole, sending me on a wild goose chase...similar to the one I've been on for the last several years.  

Patience.  It's what I'll have to work on, now.  I can play this game for as long as I need to.  But brighter days are indeed helpful for the overall mindset.

It IS, however, going to rain tomorrow.  According to my trusty weather app, God will shed some tears in the Poconos and it's going to stop on Wednesday and we should have drier conditions for the rest of the week.  Here's hoping.

In closing, I am genuinely hoping you're all well, too.  I will provide a weight update soon but since we missed last week's due to the power outage, I'll simply say that I'm hoping to drop a pound and a half this week to make my grand total an even 30 pounds.  If that happens, you'll hear from me tomorrow at some point.  If not, then I'll plod on and keep trying.  You might still hear from me, anyway.  That's future planning for you.  

- Capulet