Several months before I retired someone told me that there was a pretty good chance that as my responsibilities dwindled that my brain would relax and things I had not thought about for decades would pop out here and there.
Looking back on it I suppose if I had not been told about it I likely would not have really noticed it when it happened. The thoughts would have come anyway and then been discarded unnoticed.
I remembered the day a playmate fell out of a tree and landed on his head, got up, rubbed it and walked off like nothing had happened. It should have killed him stone dead then and there. It happened about 60 years earlier and had long since been forgotten yet it popped up crystal clear.
I remembered a part of first communion and for some reason a classmate showed up crystal clear. I was starting to doze off for a nap and that one passed through my mind. I laid back and enjoyed that one through the mind of a 71 year old man. She was a beautiful child and looked like a little cherub in her white communion dress. It was a crystal clear memory and it brought back a feeling of time gone by. In a way it was like looking at a Norman Rockwell painting in my mind.
Some were a bit scary. I shuddered at the time I was underwater at Damon's point and surfacing as an outboard motorboat went over my head and the prop missed me by inches.
Then I recalled the time I caught a small trout with my bare hands in Bare's Brook where there was supposedly no fish. Bare's Brook was nothing more than a small, shallow stream. I released the fish immediately.
The whole process of these memories was very subtle and subdued much like the the subtle, subdued pinks and light oranges of the desert sky. I probably wouldn't noticed it happening had I not been told it might.
A few months afterward when the little visions stopped I asked about a dozen retirees if they had shared similar experiences. Most had not. One said that if he did he had likely forgotten about it.
A couple did say that they they started recalling a little off-the-wall things here and there.
One guy categorically said it hadn't happened to him but a couple of weeks later met me and said that later that evening he thought about it and reported recalling the time he hit a baseball that was headed for someone's bay window and at the last minute s puff of wind, a gentle zephyr blew it slightly off course and it hit the window trim instead. He said he remembered the sense of relief very clearly.
Anyway I'm glad someone told me that it was possible that I would go through this little trip in life because I most likely would not have even given it a thought and it would have sort of 'gone in one ear and out the other' so to speak and gone unnoticed.
As for the morning sky, there's enough moisture in the air to make the morning sky interesting. There's a lot of subtle hues this morning.
My man, you need to find another job. If not a paying job, then a volunteer job. Some purpose for you to get up and leave the house every morning, because people are counting on you, and their lives are made better, because of you.
ReplyDeleteYou are far too sharp to be watching your life pass before your eyes, as the flame quietly goes out. Find a reason to burn brightly, doing what you still can.
There’s a retired USN “Boats” that started volunteering with us at the local museum ship. He often says he should have started this years ago.
ReplyDeleteThe man has lived a pretty interesting life with stories to match, and when it’s time to strike below some unwieldy equipment he keeps us all out of trouble.