Cutting the Trapeze harnesses

I don't know what happened to me, but I feel like I was slammed with a 2x4. Muscle ache, headache, nauseated stomach, no desire to get up out of bed… EEKS.

So today, rather than berate myself and force myself up into an attempt to work, I just stayed in bed… 'til 2:30PM!! I am feeling about 80 percent better, but man it really sucked.

I went to a Royal Crown Revue show last night in Pasadena that was fantastic. A beautiful night sitting on a blanket beneath palm trees lit with little white bulbs; listening to and watching top notch players putting on a show from the Levitt Pavilion, life doesn't get much better than that.

But I think the hot dog I ate may have been the culprit to my intensely sick day.

While drifting in and out of sleep, I had a chance to ponder a couple things. One, it's not a whole lot of fun being alone and sick. There's nobody to take care of you, ask you how you're doing, be concerned; not even the sounds of someone else in the house.

Oh, well. Too bad.

Also, as I drifted in and out of sleep, I had a chance to ponder the date itself: July 25^th.
Everybody has their important anniversaries, days to remember, moments in time. July 25^th is one of them for me. It is a sad one – about as sad as they get. However the event took place many years ago and it has been many years already that I could talk about it without undue emotions raging.
My mother died on July 25^th, a long time ago -- when I was twelve. For the first years, it would be an intensely sorrowful day, but as time goes on memories are smoothed, pains lessen.

The reason that I bring my mother's death up today is because in a couple weeks, I will turn the same age my mother was when she died. In a couple months, I will be older than she ever lived to be.

Several days ago, I dragged an old photo album out of the garage and for the first time in quite a few years, looked at pictures I had taken as a child. For my tenth birthday, my requested present was an SX-70 land camera. I loved taking pictures, and as a child, I diligently wrote on the Polaroids: who, what and when these pictures were of. As I'm looking at them now, it is striking me just how young my mother was; already in these first pictures, taken in 1978, she is younger than I am now.

So, today, I feel a bit like a circus performer. In a year when a lot of safety lines have been cut and nets removed, I feel that this is somehow another harness, removed and dropped to the ground far below. These are not my choices; they are just the nature of time, continually moving forward.

I'm swinging yet further into a space that some of those I looked up to never travelled.

Yeah, it's a bit disconcerting.