Esoteric Bowl

Last night, while watching the game, I saw perhaps the best play that I have ever seen in sports. It wasn’t a towering homerun or a high-flying dunk, but rather a gesture of kindness by Portland Trailblazer coach Maurice Cheeks.

Prior to the game, thirteen year old Natalie Gilbert was singing the national anthem at center court before a crowd of 19,980 in attendance and a national television audience. In the middle of the song, Gilbert forgot the words and stopped singing. Coach Cheeks walked over from the bench and put his arm around the rattled teen, and began singing the anthem with her. The crowd joined in to help complete the song, and Gilbert offered Cheeks a relieved, thank you.

In May of last year, I wrote that a friend was traveling to Japan for a couple of months and had left some art pieces for me to hold. The primary purpose of his trip was to meet the family of his fiancee. When a couple of months passed and I didn’t hear from him, I thought perhaps he was having such a good time that he decided to extend his visit.

As months passed and still hearing no word from him, I wondered if he had decided to stay in Japan permanently. I wondered if something tragic had happened to him. Or maybe he had returned to the islands with his fiancee and his life had changed in such a way that he no longer had the time or inclination to stop by. It happens sometimes, people come and go in our lives and leave us forever wondering what happened to them. There are many people in my life like that, but I like to think that good things have unfolded for them.

After all this passing of time, my friend recently came home to the islands and stopped by to pay me a visit. He surprised me when he told me that he and his fiancee had tied the knot in Japan. He is now a married man.

While his news was surprising, the real shocker was when he told me that he had been in prison for over four months. Apparently, a friend of his from Colorado had mailed some marijuana inside of a hollow candle and the Japanese authorities found it. Because the amount of marijuana was small and because he cooperated with the police, his sentence was minimal.

All of this probably did not make the best of impressions for his new bride and in-laws, but to their credit, they stood by him throughout the entire ordeal.

Although Easter has never measured up to Christmas in the holiday rankings, it was still an enjoyable holiday in my youth. My parents always made the holidays fun for my brothers and I.

The night before Easter, Mom would prepare a variety of colors of dye in plastic cups for us to color and design the eggs that she had boiled earlier in the day. Easter morning we would find Easter baskets that Mom had made, which had plenty of goodies to eat and always included a toy. And of course, there was always the big Easter feast that Mom would prepare.

One Easter morning, when I was around the third-grade age, my Dad told my brothers and I to get dressed and go to church. This was quite a surprise. In our house, Easter generally occurred more frequently during the year than our visits to church did. Still, we did as we were told. My brothers and I walked down the street to the nearest church and stayed for the service.

When the service was over and we had returned home, my parents informed us that there was going to be a contest, an Easter-egg hunt with prizes for the winners. Prizes? For the winners? Oh my, I wanted to win a prize, but my brothers were older and bigger and they would always win. Still, I would try my best.

When the hunt began, I scrambled from room to room in search for those eggs. My Father was such a good hider, but I was finding them. Maybe, just maybe, egg-hunting was something that I could do better than my brothers. I giggled with joy after each new find, placing each egg in my basket and continuing my quest to find more.

After all the eggs had been collected, we each counted our individual bounty. The oldest brother laughed because he had won. The second oldest brother laughed because I had come in last. Dad jokingly reassured me that I didn’t come in last, but rather in third place.

It was time for the prizes. I can’t recall the prizes that brothers won that day, but I won a brand new baseball glove. A baseball glove was exactly what I had wanted. As I sat admiring my new glove, I thought it was a stroke of good luck that I didn’t win the contest afterall or I wouldn’t have won this very cool glove. I thought it was amazing how my brothers and I had won exactly what we had wanted.

I stumbled to bed and layed down to rest myself. All was a blur as I struggled to focus my vision. My head was pounding and auras flowed repeatedly as my mind raced a million miles an hour. Trying my best to quiet the mind and calm the pain with a meditative state, prescription medicine, and a mega dose of Tylenol.

Obviously I didn’t die, but it sure felt like I was going to. And though my life didn’t flash before my eyes, I did happen to wonder in those darkest of moments about how much time would pass before my body would be discovered and regretted the fact that my home would be found in such a messy state.

I’m feeling much better now, but taking things in slow motion for a while. I think that I will clean the house today.

For a while now, Kitty has been brave enough to come inside the house to eat. He eats in the kitchen and then he hangs out with me for a while before I let him return outdoors. But recently I was avoiding him in a roundabout way. It had been a while since I had gone shopping for groceries. The food supply was running low, and I had also run out of cat food. I know he has a couple of food sources, so he is never going to starve in between the feedings I provide.

Still, I avoided him just so that I wouldn’t disappoint him with the news of not having food. But no matter how quietly I tiptoed towards the mailbox, he always came running towards me with his happy meow. I gave him what I had, and he didn’t seem to mind the fried rice or in sharing the scrabbled eggs, but he always gazed at me afterwards with the same where’s the beef look.

Yesterday I went shopping for groceries and I also bought Kitty his food. I fed him his favorite of sliced chicken and gravy dinner, and as a treat, I poured a saucer of milk. When he had finished eating and drinking everything, he looked quite content. He layed on the carpet and put his head on my lap and began to close his eyes.

Suddenly he got up and walked over to the door when there was a light scracthing sound. Apparently one of the other strays was on the other end of the door, probably the bully cat that picks on the other cats from time to time. Kitty sniffed at the bottom of the opening for a moment, and then he turned and looked at me with his big Kitty smile.

I’m too old to go down to the neighborhood bar to start a fistfight. I’m too young to yell at the television. I don’t have the good luck of being in a relationship where I can upset my significant other now and then just for the hell of it. I don’t even have a big dog to come home to that I can kick on occasion, not that I would if I did have a dog.

But good fortune has shined upon me with a blog, where I can vent and complain with or without cause. I can point-out the wrongs and injustices of life when the mood strikes, and I can express my rage at the nameless and faceless.

And I am blessed with family and friends that let me slide somewhat when I get into one of those moods. They see the kindness when there is none, and they look beyond my S.O.B days, continuing to read what I have to say and responding in their own individual way. Life is good, and I am forever grateful. Forgive me if I offend on occasion.

I received an email from Mom, reminding me that yesterday was Grandpa’s birthday. Had he still been living, he would have turned 89. I remember when he passed long ago, I thought that he was old. Now, eighty-nine doesn’t seem so old at all.

Years ago, I had several opportunities to go to California to visit the grandparents for summer vacation. During one visit, when I was around eleven years old, I became sick with the flu. It was the kind of flu where keeping food down is virtually impossible, and the simple act of walking hurts the head.

Feeling as badly as I did, all I wanted to do was sleep. But Grandma insisted that I eat something, so she prepared a small bowl of watermelon cubes for me to eat. The juicy fruit was cold and it tasted good, and I think it might have helped bring the fever down.

Unfortunately, the watermelon didn’t want to stay, and I reached the bathroom just in time to throw it all up. After flushing the toilet and rinsing my mouth, I returned to the bedroom in a haze. I laid down in bed, wanting nothing more than to sleep. As I began to doze, my tongue ran across my teeth and I noticed that my retainer was not in my mouth. My retainer was gone! Granted a missing retainer is not the end of the world, but it is for an eleven year old boy.

I looked in the bathroom, but I couldn’t find it. Grandma looked, and then my Grandpa. Then Grandpa pointed-out that I probably flushed it down the toilet. I suddenly began to worry that I would be in trouble when my parents found out that I had lost my retainer.

Later, as I was back in bed, Grandma came into the room to tell me that I didn’t need to worry. She told me that there was still hope, for at that very moment Grandpa was attempting to retrieve the retainer with a magnet and a spool of string. While I apreciated the effort that Grandpa made to fish out the retainer, I was glad that he wasn’t able to catch it.