Cast of Characters

It's difficult to describe the Cast of Characters that appear in the Last Quarter ....  that unfold in the natural process of a Life Unfolding over many years. I suppose it is similar for all species and most times of years. Still, the addition of the sense of awareness adds, at least, color to the mix. In the Open Seas beyond one's partner or spouse, Children, Grandchildren, Kin and In-law Kin, ex-kin and soon-to-be ex-kin, Friends and their Coterie of Friends. A travelling weekend at holiday time is not quite like the Halloween House of Horrors Walk that your cardiologist recommended you not take due to idiopathic arrhythmias.

 Travelling with M ... no more than 400 miles ... and we've seen three of our four siblings and their living spouses, 2/3's of our kids and in-law kids, half the grandspawn, at least one niece and her beau, and sundry friends and livestock. One of my grandkids is studying the rapprochement between Jacob and Esau ... I assured her that, for Ole Man Grandpa, it's easier sometimes to read about these meetings than to participate in them. It has little, to my way of thinking, to do with the holidays. People blame these seasonal events on the madness of families ... vestigial families ... those that no longer provide shelter or food to each other except ceremoniously ... the madness of the litter of families gone-by when they meet "to celebrate."

 Thirteen or so years ago, I wrote about self reflection as a process involving a maze of mirrors ... parallel and orthogonal ... smoky ... clear ... cracked ... a maze into which one peers seeing reflections of times, of places and of persons ... current and gone by ... one looks in and finds wonders and also frightening compound and broken mirrored scenes from which ancient images of oneself betimes look back. ... 'Beware of who you look at ... they may look back right at you.'

Children that once populated the back play areas of station wagons in the era before SUV's and even before seat belts now may appear middle-aged and successes in their own right. They're surrounded by worlds of their own making. Older siblings may be more than a bit addled? Younger siblings may reflect curious lives committed to foreign principles of living. At one such Oasis on our journey through the Badlands of Time, we stumbled upon a VHS tape of my parents' 50th anniversary get -together. M and I were barely 40 and our kids were young and quite healthy looking ... unencumbered, still, by relationships with boyfriends/girlfriends. Our four parents were all still with us. Dancing, eating, toasting the lives they had built; our youngest was just 12 years old. VHS = Very Hot Spirits? Now, mostly chilled by the Passage of Time and by Edgar Allen Poe's "Vulture, whose wings are dull reality."

My Mom and Dad were right in the middle of the Fourth Quarter ... M's parents a half a decade younger. M and I have the roadtrip back, today. We drove up in our older son's 'royal chariot' with his wife and daughter. He followed our trail the next day in our roadster and traded back. The roadster ... we'll go home in the roadster with the top securing us from Winter's chill ... the roadster wouldn't make it up to our younger son's home ... up a dignified driveway to a warm and very religious home. M and I will go home, today, in the roadster to fascinate and laugh and tear up about the past 48+ years, together ... bringing with us thrills and disappointments, packing the boots of our little rover with  all of this and more.