Tree Photos

Here are four tree snapshots I took 10 days ago.  I was busy yesterday clearing leaves off the front yard, driveway, and patio; mulching the backyard leaves.  When I returned home after spending a couple of hours away from the house, I found the the property again covered with fallen leaves.

Leaf Blower Yardwork

 Leaves Again

It’s early Tuesday afternoon, the 12th day of October, 2010.  I have a headache and have had, except while sleeping, since yesterday evening.  I’ve spent four, four and a half hours, total, using my new Stihl BR 380 D leaf-blower to  clean up the thousands of leaves that’ve fallen in my yard over the past three weeks.  Yesterday, I failed to use hearing protection, but this morning I did not again make that mistake.  I wore ear protection that dulls the report of a garden variety assault-rifle, and found it sufficient to render bearable the Stihl’s loud engine.

I wish I had one hundred dollars for every leaf that falls in my yard every year.  Later on I may post a photo I snapped showing the leaves piled at the curb.  To look at the yard right now, however, you wouldn’t know I’d done a thing if it were not for the evidence of the leaves piled at the curb.

I should have bought the thing on wheels that looks like a large box-fan that is supposed to be useful in blowing large masses of leaves in one direction as it is moved by the operator back and forth across the lawn on its wheels. 

In spite of the headache and sense of failed effort vis-a-vis the leaves in my yard, I wrote this weblog entry.

A Busy October

I’ve been doing a lot of reading and writing for another project that has deadlines, so haven’t had as much time to spare for what my wife calls “joy-reading” or, for that matter, free written expression. I’ve also been attempting to research long-term vocational and other life outcomes for child sufferers of post-traumatic stress syndrome – but have found little of use in the journals usually devoted to this sort of thing.

Sometime during the month of October, 2009, fell the anniversary of my 25th year of sobriety. By no means have I lived all of the past 25 years responsibly or even in the way that made best sense to my thought processes that were occasionally impaired by rigidly held conceits and residue of a less than idyllic childhood. To the good, however, I never did go all Heathcliff, criminal; nor did I continue to actively seek my own destruction. I can only credit the faith of Christ for this.

In the Orwellian Year, in the cool early afternoon of a sunny October day, I dressed in my best clothes and made my way, I do not recall how, to a restaurant called El Paso Cantina located at one end of Ports O’Call Village in San Pedro, which is the port of Los Angeles. I had a bout five cigarettes in a shiny metal case, a Zippo lighter, and maybe five or six dollars. I was an underage drinker, but was rarely carded. I ordered some kind of mixed drink. The waitress, a young woman named Vlasta or Vlosta, of Yugoslavian ancestry, brought me my drink and gave me her telephone number. It must have been the next day that I checked myself in at San Pedro Peninsula Hospital’s drug and alcohol rehabilitation unit, thinking that I would there learn to control my drinking as a preliminary means to regaining some self-control and self-direction. I had become a sort of monster. I was about two months shy of my 21st birthday.

The recidivism rate for programs of that sort are high, and I do not know whether any of those in-patient with me , or even any of the program’s counseling staff, have remained clean and/or sober during the intervening years. During the course of my life I have, for the most part, turned my back on the acquaintances or ‘friends’ of my time as a drunkard. The people with whom I have kept in touch are the people who, for a number of reasons, matter to me. Along the way, I have met and both befriended and been befriended by other people who matter, and I wish I could have kept in touch with all of them. Even among those who matter, I have found it best to distinguish between those experience has taught me are best kept at arm’s length and those who generally tend to live and speak out of a truth that imbues them with a greater value.

I recall a dream I had sometime shortly before my 30th birthday. I was on a paved-over embankment sitting with my back against a chain-link fence feeling the warmth radiating up from the asphalt covered ground and metal of the fence, looking at the playground and buildings of Crestwood Street Elementary School – another of many places of unhappy memory for me – and was aware in that instant that everybody I loved knew that I loved them, whether I’d been in touch with them or not. When I awoke, I accepted the dream-world knowledge as fact, and went on.

My family and I had a good Halloween. My wife dressed our little boy as the cartoon dog, Blue, and we took him to visit family and friends. As we were leaving our neighborhood, I was incensed at the fact that people who appeared to be of the tax-consumer class were bringing their children in carloads. I thought that it is bad enough the government steals my money to pay their rent, buy their groceries, pay their utility bills, and now buy them cellular telephones and “minutes,” now I am supposed to give their children candy? Of course, none of that’s the fault of the children, and I normally have some charitable feeling for children regardless of their class. We ate supper at my mom’s house in another neighborhood, and our son was frightened by the orange Scream mask worn by a polite child who came to the door seeking candy. Seventy-Six ran off crying, and later, during the meal, seated in a place where he could see the front door, kept looking apprehensively over there saying, “Door?” We didn’t let him have any candy, but I think we did let him have some frozen yogurt.

My work has required me to travel to a county I’m not usually tasked with visiting, and the driving involved has been tiring.

Our house is situated among a number of mature trees, and a million leaves have fallen on our yard. Another million or so are poised to fall over the next couple of weeks. I have discovered raking. My other strategy for coping with fallen leaves is even more primitive and ignorant, although it involves the use of an internal combustion engine and moving mechanical parts: I drive the lawn mower over the leaves repeatedly until they are ground up to the point where my conscience isn’t bothered by leaving (har) them where they lie. Even if that’s not correct, it is euphonious. Three of my nephews recently came over and, in exchange for a few dollars, helped move the piles of leaves to the curb. The youngest of the boys worked the most diligently. The older two combined their work with squirrel-like silliness.

We got a contract on our old house with a buyer more qualified and more committed to its purchase who is using a realtor and a mortgage company capable of performing the functions necessary to complete their assigned tasks.

That’s all I know good, right now. My great adventure is living the ordinary life in an ordinary way.