Third shift still sucks. Twice in the last week I arrived at my 9am class after working ten plus hours the previous night. That and payrolled screwed up so I won't get my big "Holiday-my-ass-bonus" until after the new year.....In the next week I have a 20 page, a ten page and a 30 page paper due. The 30-pager is already out of the way (It was a final for a creative writing class....(duh)..I finished it in September) but the other classes are dry, scaly, arid academic prose....
No wonder no one likes english....
Thanksgiving greeted us with eight inches of ice and snow caked in thick white tufts gracing the American Heartland. A goliath, three hundred pound slab of oak fell over blocking Uncle Mike's driveway and I put on my cowboy hat ( The one I redeemed from Marlboro back in '97 for a mere 300 miles) and used a chainsaw; hacking each limbs with a disel-fuled sever; lugging the sawed timer deep into the woods behind Mike's house. It was arduous work and sweat froze in little beady icicles on my forehead as I ploughed the skeletal branches across the slick drive, burrowing them deep in the post autmunal foliage of the same woods I used to play in as a child--the woods I immortalized as the "Nuclear Woods" in my first novel.
My great-Aunt turned 98 the day after Thanksgiving. She grew up in a farm outside Kewanee.
Over her life she's witnessed a genesis of tehcnological advancement unprecedented in the discourse of this planet. She's witnessed the automobile, the airplane-the space rocket--radio and telephone turn into television turn into internet. She's lived through presidential assasinations; spiritual segregation, the civil right movement--Viewed through the eyelashes of an aged centurian, her planet has remained the exact same size yet has decresed rather dramatically. She could tell you where she was when News reached her of the Titanic's descent. She's kept her wit and her insight and her memory; She remembers the name of every female I've ever brought to Thanksgiving dinner. Every wrinkle indented into her papery skin serves as an indelible fold to the testament of the human condition. ..
Gotta study. Hoping to blogg holiday memoirs in a week or so.....
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1 comment:
w0w. i do love to watch American houses on Thanksgiving night, with the lights, the parties, the food, the calm. one day i wish i could belong somewhere. eh. this is not a soppy comment. but i am tired and mental censorship is switched off. i guess i love Thanksgiving, but i doubt i'd ever make a proper thxgiving dinner. (-:
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