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I just ordered this scale off of etsy.com  Surely I’m not the only one that loves etsy.  I saw this scale and the memories flooded back. I never owned a postage scale.  But oh how I loved sending my Uncle David letters.  Oh how I loved my Uncle David.  So much so my son carry’s his name forever. (Keith David)  I’m sure I’ve blogged this before somewhere. My Uncle David was 18 and I was 8.  He was a bit lost, oh but he was kind and good and everyone loved him.  He joined the Marines and he left and I missed him madly. I was 8 and he was my hero.

I wrote him letters when he took off for the military.  He was at Camp Lejune, then California and then a long stint in Japan.  Letters….carefully scripted and laid out with joy.  I adored him and I took my letter writing seriously.  And he wrote back to me.  His letters were amazing. I thought the world of him.  Always.  For 7 years we wrote each other letters.  (I still have his.)  When I turned 15..nearing 16 he got out of the military and he came back home…at least close to home in PA ..he was in Maryland.  He came home to PA on the weekends and he got a serious girlfriend.  He was 26.  He got a job operating a backhoe for a construction company 2 hours away in Maryland. 

One day he went to work, with a pocket full of cough drops, cold medicine tablets and used kleenex.  He was coming home for the weekend that day.  It was early December.  We were all looking forward to Christmas because he was home for the holidays for the first time since I was 8.

My grandmother smelled something burning that afternoon but found nothing wrong in her house.  She spent a half hour looking for the source of the burning smell to no avail. 

That afternoon my Uncle was operating his backhoe, removing a tree from muddy wet ground.  It was a soggy cold December day in Maryland.  They were putting a shopping mall there.  His backhoe tipped into the hole left behind from the tree.  When it tipped he jumped from the backhoe.  He jumped to the wrong side and was crushed instantly.

My world changed that afternoon when my mother told me “You’re Uncle David was killed today in a backhoe accident”.  That was the first time I learned all about loss.  All about pain.  All about agony.  It was the first time I knew how much a person could hurt inside.  Those were dark weeks watching my grandparents grieve for their son.  Hard dark weeks when I would have killed for just one more letter.  And then Christmas came.  My Uncle had bought everyone a Christmas gift just a week before his untimely death.  He had gone shopping for everyone with my Aunt Kathy (his sister).  On Christmas Eve, age 15 I opened white gold hoop earrings from my Uncle David.  His signature on the attached card hurt so bad.  The loops of the a…the dot on the i strangling the air from my chest.  He was supposed to be home for the first time in forever, but he was instead gone.

I loved him more than anyone I knew at that time. I looked up to him.  He taught me my ABC’s when I was 4. I remember reciting them and angering my older sister who was struggling to learn her ABC’s. I remember feeling better than her just once in my life…that day.  Because of Uncle David.  I remember laying on his chest watching The Adam’s Family and clicking her fingers to the opening jingle together.  My memories of him are so vivid, so alive, so completely forever.

Postage.  Mail.  I have so many reasons to love a letter in the mail.  My Uncle David was the first person who taught me the power of a letter.  The love that could be contained within.  The permanence of the written word.  The power of love stringing through the sentences winging their way across countries, lasting lifetimes, making their mark on hearts for a lifetime.

I saw this scale and I remembered him.  I bought it.  It’s winging it’s way to my house.  The art of writing a letter, it’s slowly being lost.

Write someone a love letter today.  For me.  For my Uncle David.  For someone to have and keep forever.  Lives end but words written down last.

“If you live in Salt Lake City, Utah, Buffalo, N.Y., or Rochester, N.Y., your ride to work is probably the smoothest of any big city in the country. Residents of Tampa, Fla., Detroit, Mich. and Atlanta, Ga., on the other hand, endure the most grueling slog to work” via msn

Why do you think I was soo excited to hear about the funding for a new high speed rail system in Tampa.  I get lost everytime I drive across the bridge and leave St Pete.  The minute I hit Tampa it’s hell.  I have a college degree yet I’m direction dyslexic.  I get lost and call Rick all the time. 

Reason 654,3321,123 I pick Rick….because he gets me un-lost without getting irritated.

Mostly, I just feel scared. Inadequate. Ill-prepared. Weak.  All the things I thought I left behind years ago.

I want to talk about it but then again I don’t.  I can’t quite figure it out.  My weekend was rather uneventful, however Keith did call and then midway through the conversation he handed the phone off to his girlfriend.  I know I was the one once on the receiving end of the “hand-off phone” when this very child’s father had to talk to his mother and handed the phone off to me.  Lovely how history repeats itself but only in the worst of ways.  Lovely how I’m on the receiving end of the phone call but I end up not talking to my own child at all.  The grandma was supposed to call me, I think maybe she did but she didn’t leave a message.  She lives somewhere in Sebring.  Oh heck..why not bail out there kid…that’s only 101.13 miles and 1 hour 59 minutes away from anyone that you know or might consider still calling family.  Ahhh but I have no clue…because he says that he “loves her”.  “I love her Mom”.  *sigh*

Life goes on.  It seems as if it shouldn’t or couldn’t or at the very least an emotional earthquake would cause something to come to a screeching hault but that is not how life goes.  Life keeps moving.  The sun keeps coming up.  The sun keeps going down.  The lung’s keep working even when the heart is broken.

Far be it for me to win the lottery and then have that history repeat itself, eh?

So much I want to say and yet there is that wall, invisible and complicated all at once.  A wall that says “no you can’t..how can you write this to make sense, so that people understand?  Why do you care if they understand?  Do you have regrets? No, I think that I did the best I could with what I had, I made choices so I could…..

Oh wait…that would be to blog about it.  7 years ago I made choices.  Hard ones.  For years I told myself they were right.  Now I’m wavering.  Now everything that I anticipated hasn’t happened, things that the best fiction writer couldn’t write are happening.

“I’m falling to pieces” over and over again on “Break Even – The Script” over and over “when a heart breaks, it don’t break even”.

On one hand I’m accepting, the other side tells me that some choices make a person’s life so harsh…so much harder.  On the other hand I strongly believe we all are given a life to lead and live the best way we see fit.  “Just pray to a god I don’t believe in”.  I’ve caught myself this week wanting to pray.  Pray to a God I long ago walked away from.

I got a book in the mail from Nie…simply holding it makes me feel better.  I can’t concentrate on the words, I can’t pick apart who I am anymore. I can’t quite grasp things. I’m having nightmares…what will happen in ten years, 15….20…..it’s mind boggling.  And yet I still succeeded on some levels…to get precisely what I wanted.  I got what I wanted.  But the price ..i didn’t pay…someone else is paying?  Or are they?

I’m so confused…so exasperated.  I need a manual.  Instead, I rub the cover of a book I have never opened.  Where do any of us belong? Where do we find the answers that are right for ourselves, without making choices for other people.  Aren’t other people supposed to have their own say.

My mother wanted to make me someone she wanted.  I didn’t want that.  She bailed.  I broke into a million pieces.  I want to scream that none of this is right…because it’s not right for me.  But if it’s right for someone else…and love is unconditional…isn’t it acceptance that is necessary here.  Ok ok I accept..but it doesn’t heal the fracture.  I see everything that could be..it’s hard to let go for that and let someone be what they most want.

I swore I’d never be judgemental and now that’s the beast I am fighting against the most.

Either way…love…it’s so big..so big I can’t wrangle it..so big that I can’t hold it in…so BIG it’s hard to comprehend.

“Keep on dreaming even if it breaks your heart”….how is it that iTunes is echoing my thoughts.  Good ole Will Hogue.

Part of me wants to grasp a tshirt and throw a fit and scream and yell…the other part just wants to know if I failed.   Another part just is glad I haven’t lost everything again.

If you accept someone as is…does that mean you condone what is?  Does that mean you love without judgment?  Does it mean you gave up and don’t care?

The thing I fear about openly blogging, JUDGEMENT ugly JUDGEMENT I was run over like a train by JUDGEMENT for years…is the same thing that I myself and trying to hold off like holding off a Monster with the blunt edge of a butter knife.  Sometimes I lose, other times the sheer desire to fend it off keeps it at bay…but it’s a fucking constant struggle.

I wake up with heartache, I go to sleep next to fear and have nightmares clutching hope.  Love is a bitch.  A whore who sometimes steals your peace.  Most often blindsides you with anxiety. Never fails to surprise you and rarely gives without taking.