An Old Day Now

I have sea scallops for dinner tonight. They are good. I was an impulse buyer at the grocery store today. A young fella was giving samples back by the seafood counter. People, for some reason I don't comprehend, tend to avoid the seafood counter.

Anyways, the young man asked me if I wanted to try one and I said "Sure".

So here I sit, eating 2 pounds of scallops, praying to the Almighty that I don't get a flare-up of gout after this.

My imagination has taken me in way too many directions in the last few weeks. I have entertained seriously a re-living of my past, hoping and praying that my past was somehow going to bring me some peace and take me to where I needed to be. Somehow, it did.

I realized that what I knew all along was right. I saw that the past was a wonderful place to be but not where I was. I saw faces of people I've loved and lost right along side people I've despised and wished gone. Alas, some are dead. Right now I miss even the ones that I despised and wished gone.

But I digress. The past, buddy. The past...

I'm just about through with the scallops. I had some cracker bread with them and a little bit of some kind of Irish beer. I think I overdid the pepper seeds on the scallops though. No matter, I'll have another beer.

I was blue this afternoon, more than I've been in a long time. I realized how much people count on us, even when we aren't there to support them. I saw a face of sadness I never expected to see, looking at me for the last light, the last flicker of a flame near gone. I felt the blues in my heart as I drove the other direction, into the black clouds of real life. The soothing rain fell on me as I drove. It washed nothing away, just cooled the heat.

Where do you go when you feel like there's nowhere left to go? Is that the end or, maybe, a new beginning?

I don't know. If I knew the way, I would take you home.