truck lane 500 feet

that's what it says on the sign in front of me; i'm pulled over to the side of VT route 9. i stopped to check my map and fix the zipper on my ski pants and i noticed that my computer had connected to someone's network.

i left Flyingfisher's house later than planned; i slept kinda late and there was breakfast and we kind of sat around talking a little.

even so, i managed to find ten caches (nine?), the last two in the dark.

i've had my very luxuriant dinner; i bought a hot turkey breast. and i had a fruit smoothie, a couple of little corn muffins, some cheese, and a very fine cream cheese brownie.

i also did a little light shopping and bought a roll of paper towels and a pair of sharpies. i don't understand what happened to my sharpies, but i had a surplus of them when i left work monday afternoon and all of a sudden i can't find any.

maybe it has something to do with the way my gear gets packed in the car. because i live in here, i have to be very precise in where things go. everythign has a bag; glove bag, raingear bag, cache stuff bag, cache pack...

anyway, if a thing gets put in the wrong bag or falls onto the floor, chances are pretty good that i won't find it until i get home.

well.

it's about 1900h and i'd better get going, or i won't get all my water heated up and stuff ready for bed.

hope you're all having a good week.

way past odd

hey, it's only a few days later and i'm writing again! i'm almost caught up in my geocaching logs; i might be able to finish them tonight, if i get lucky and/or ambitious.

i've seen dave a couple of times since i last wrote. he's doing really well. it's hard to get him to start his work, but with some gentle prodding and much patience and good humor, he gets to it.

i used to have a kid in class who, when i said to him "you are an odd child.", he answered with "i am way past odd."

i loved this kid. every day he had something new and fresh to say. quirky sense of humor.

he graduated, went off to college, came back home.

he waited on me at the hardware store today. he is tall and handsome, polite and competent. he has a wife and child. he's a fireman. i have never forgotten him. i still love him. i've wondered sometimes where he is, what he's up to.

now i know.

open letter to "dave"

hey, dave?

it wasn't so bad today, was it? i know you melted down last time i saw you, so you weren't sure how to make your re-entry. you insisted that i hate you.

"i think only one of us gets to decide whether or not i hate you", i said.

you sat beside me, making editorial comments, quietly returning to that one point. you took it as evidence that i wasn't calling you up to talk to me earlier in the order. and just as quietly, firmly, patiently i kept explaining to you that i was calling whoever's name was on top of my stack.

you kept up with the comments, but as time went on i felt that you meant it less. you were uncoiling some. the truth is that i love you. you don't feel it and i don't think you'd believe it, but i hope that in time you'll come to know it as surely as you know anything.

and i'm sorry about your meltdown. i know now that it was a case of misplaced anger; it wasn't originally me you were angry at, but then when you tried to tell me about it, i didn't really hear you.

my fault. i realize that i was on my lunch break, trying to eat and get back to class, but ultimately my allegiance has to be to you and not to my own lunch. i failed you in that moment and i'm sorry. we both paid for it later. maybe i'll learn something from this. maybe i'll get some insight about how to talk to you, how to make you feel welcome and loved, safe and enfolded.

so. i'll see you again in a day or two. i'll try really hard to be patient and meet you where you are.

believe.

time flies

all right, so i blew off the entire month of october. i'm sorry. i got caught up in some other stuff.

for a couple of days i was kind of weirded out by the effect you get when people with whom you are not actually that intimate kind of assume that level of friendship from reading your blog. and to a lesser degree, when you are standing there having a conversation with a live person and you KNOW you didn't tell them that one thing, but they pick up the conversation there anyway.

i knew what i was getting into when i started writing all this; it's a brand of performance art. i used to work as a storyteller. for a while i told children's stories, but then i started telling true stories. reaction was mixed. it was harder to get gigs, but the audiences had a stronger bond to the material.

so that probably only put me off for a few days.

and there was this thing about work; it takes a LOT of energy to be back doing the job i love. i have either been working at this job or preparing to work at it since about 1976, so it's kind of important to me.

and a lot has been happening there, a lot worth writing about, but due to the nature of the job, there's very little i can tell you about.

there was one thing, which is pretty much in the realm of public knowledge and old news to boot by this time:

one of our boys died last monday.

he had been in a car wreck sunday night and they kept him alive through about half the morning on monday. harvested a lot of organs, so maybe, just MAYBE some good can come out of this stupid, stupid horrible senseless thing.

one thing that maybe you should know about me is that i'm not anybody's mother, nor am i likely to be. so these children, the ones i work with, are my own precious children. they take that level of importance in my heart. and it just about kills me every time we have to bury one of them.

last fall a boy looked over at me and asked "if i died, would you cry?"

yes, i would.

a lot.

i don't know exactly why he asked; sometimes kids are just trying to put things in perspective, trying to understand.

everybody just wear your freakin' seatbelts, ok?


and besides all that, i'm pretty famous in the geocaching world for my complete failure to be up-to-date on my geocache logs. basically it's a lot like this, except the narration is broken up and spread out over the geocaches i visit. same activity, different venue. and i got over seventy logs behind largely because instead of writing my logs, i was keeping a blog.

so i kind of wanted to get caught up in the logs before i came back here and on top of it all, i've been spending time on the road.

maybe next time i write i'll have something interesting to say.