Houses of Your Mind

I lay in bed this morning, unable to return to sleep after awakening with a full bladder and going to the bathroom. Like everyone else during times like this, once back in bed my mind began scanning data lodged for decades in my brain, dredging up memories and replaying what seemed like megabytes of useless information.

Mostly, during times like these, I want to locate a key in my brain and turn it off, at least for a few hours. This morning, it was not to be and proved somehow different. While raking through the trash piles of my brain, I discovered something that blew me away. I want say remembered, because this snippet of information is something that I have always inherently known, but have never put together in a logical thought process. What did I discover? Well, this may not sound so unusual to you fair readers out there, but the more I think of it, the stranger it seems to me.

For whatever reason, I was thinking about my grandparents. My dad’s mother, Dale and her husband Oscar lived on a farm outside of Atlanta in east Texas. My mom’s mother, Lela and her husband Jim lived about a mile from us in Vivian, Louisiana. As random thoughts raced through my brain like water through an empty pipe, I gradually became aware of an apparent truth that had somehow escaped me my entire life.

The houses of both my grandparents were identical. They were exactly the same size and all the specific rooms – bathroom, kitchen, bedrooms, dining room, and living room – occupied exactly the same place. They even had the same directional orientation.

Strange, I grant you, but not beyond the realm of simple coincidence considering they were all built about the same time, and not more than fifty miles from one another. Then it dawned on me. The house were I grew up was the same as my grandparents, right down to each individual room. The only difference was the directional orientation. My house was situated perpendicular to that of my grandparent’s.

Wide-awake at four in the morning, I began trying to remember my neighbor’s houses and those of my friends. My friend Clay’s house, I realized, was exactly like mine except it was oriented differently. I could not quite remember the interior of Rod, Wiley, Elwin and Tim’s houses although I think they were different.

What in the hell does all this mean? I admit the thought worried me at four in the morning. After ruminating on the matter all day long, I can conclude only one of three things. 1) Some builder knocked out copies of the same house, and managed to market his product over many miles. 2) We are random although somehow ordered creations in the mind of some stellar being, or 3) there is some sort of chaotic yet orderly recipe for the world, as we know it.

My logic tells me that the first explanation is correct, but I wonder – do we have the vaguest clue as to who we really are, or even loosely realize what motivations or earth-shattering processes control our destinies?

Eric'sWeb

Souvenir Tee Shirts

Decades of clutter populates my house and office. An organizational message appeared in my mail yesterday. If you have not used something in two years, it said, chances are you never will. Toss it was the impending message. Clutter slows you down, impedes your life and makes you unhappy.

Maybe so, I thought as I folded my laundry. Maybe I should throw away some of my old tee shirts, especially those with tears and stains. I began sorting the tee shirts on my bed with that thought in mind.

The first tee I held up for inspection was from the Redbud 10K race of 2000. I had to think a moment before its relevance came to mind. When it did, it poured over me with a poignant flood of memories, still painful after almost eight years.

Barely managing to cope with the death of my wife in 1998, I had gained an enormous amount of weight, and I continued to seethe with an inner anger that would not quit saying, “why me?” Jogging had helped me maintain my sanity during Anne’s illness and I needed to know that I still had the physical, and the mental strength to go the distance.

I parked my car a mile from the starting line and walked the rest of the way to loosen my muscles I knew would be screaming uncle long before the finish of the six-point-two mile course. Halfway there, a young man jogged up and began walking with me.

“Are you doing the Freedom Walk,” he asked.

“Nope,” I said. “The 10K.”

“You sure you can make it, big fellow?”

“Don’t know, but that’s what I’m here to find out,” I told him.

“You can do it,” he said. “But you need to go out slow. Don’t get caught up in the crowd. Just run your own race. If you get tired, then walk for awhile.”

With that, the man I am positive was an angel tapped me on the shoulder and jogged away without another word. Before I reached the starting line, it began to rain. It continued to rain until I completed the 6.2 miles that I did without stopping, not even once. The torrent ended as I crossed the line.

“I can’t throw this baby away,” I said, folding the tee shirt and putting it aside.

The next tee was from the Downtown Oklahoma City Art’s Festival of 1995. There was no Oklahoma City Art’s Festival in 1995. City Fathers canceled the event because of the Oklahoma City bombing attack on the Murrah Building in April of 1995. I bought the tee a year later, as the festival had an unsold stock of them. The tee had a torn sleeve where my Labrador Lucky had taken a bite from it when he was a puppy. Lucky, my best friend in the world, had helped me survive my grief. Folding the tee, I put it aside.
“Can’t throw this one away either,” I said.

Ten raggedy tees later, I had failed to throw even one of them away.

Sitting here now, punching these random thoughts out for all you anonymous people in the blogosphere, I cannot help but think of the clutter in my life. Yes, I need to throw some things away. I know existence would be simpler and better if I could control the chaos in my house, my office and yes, in my brain.

Maybe, but perhaps the clutter in our lives is really the essence of our being, the essential glue that binds our very souls. I do not know. What I do know is that without memories we would be little more than pulsating blobs of protoplasm.

Stuffing the tees in my chest of drawers, I forced shut the drawer and decided to worry about the chaos later.

Louisiana Mystery Writer