Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.
My friend, Rich, is going down to the jailhouse in Gastonia, NC, today with Lisa. That’s where they do weddings in Gastonia, which I think is fairly cool in its own way. I might be tempted to marry again my ownself if I could do it in a jailhouse. But the places I’m likely to be they probably do it someplace else.
At least I hope so.
But I’m tickled pea green for old Rich, and Lisa too. Good people kicking holes in the future, driving new tunnels into places neither of them could have gone by themselves.
When I first became acquainted with Rich I’d have never dreamed something of this sort would emerge among his lifetime pathways. He was an angry, bitter man carrying around all manner of rages left over from the Vietnam War jungles, losing a son in an accident a decade-or-so earlier, a wife working up to dying as a result of environmental issues.
As nearly as I could tell, Rich was a cauldron seething with more things to be angry about than a person would be likely to turn loose of during whatever he could squeeze in as a rest-of-his-life. Rich and I would talk on the phone for hours at a time and during those first years after he became a widower the experience was dizzying for me. At times he teetered on the edge of a depression I was concerned he mightn’t climb back out of.
After I’d hang up I’d have to run through more-than-usual gratitude affirmations, forgiveness affirmations, grab a cat to scratch behind the ears, and in a pinch, do an EFT-like tapping ritual to get my feet back on the ground where I wanted them.
But gradually Rich pulled himself into a different place and the rage slowly dissipated, peeled away in layers, seemed to me. I suspect gratitude affirmations might have been part of how he did it, but taken in time-lapse head photographs within my mind it seems both unlikely and profound.
Then he met Lisa and bubbled up into being an old codger so happy with himself and his life maybe he belonged in the jailhouse. Anything makes a man that happy is almost certainly illegal in the US these days.
So here’s me, shooting some gratitude affirmations to the Universe for Rich and Lisa. And hoping they don’t keep them inside too long.
Old Jules
So Far From Heaven 