Yesterday

...was a really bad day for me.  I even wrote about it on my Joy Thread, which, according to the numbers, nobody read.  If anybody did, the entry turned out to be at least twice what I intended, and was so long, I imagine anyone who looked in gave up before they started. If anyone noticed I had made a new post, I imagine they might think - there she goes again, all about positivity and a new World Coming crap.  Can't blame anyone - all my bad. This one promises to be about the same length, and I get that most people reading form threads dnt want long tomes, so be forewarned.

It was a day for looking into that dark side and embracing the dragons.  I think I did manage to do that, for the most part.  There is just a whole lot of stuff connected to that day.  It was, for those, most of you apparently, who didn't read the post, the day my baby brother was born - it was also an official Thanksgiving Day - don't think I mentioned that.

But somehow, all I could focus on as I wrote, and for the whole rest of the day, was the day he died.  I hadn't planned to write about that, when I started the post.   It's like I've said.  You repress the dark side and it will pop up to haunt you.  I hadn't planned to write about it, and won't now.  It's there if you care to see what I'm talking about.

The writing was automatic, and I found myself revealing something that I have never - ever disclosed to anyone before, about that day and my thoughts as I stood on that stairwell that for a split second I thought that it was my duty to sacrifice my own life so my brother might live.  It was a crazy adolescent thought that I did not consciously think about afterwards, but that never really left me until my mother's confession about what had really happened.   By that time, Lynn was a baby.

I reread the post today and thought about deleting it, or at least editing it, and decided to leave it, because in the long run, it is still an eample of the things I've been trying to say lately.

Today I've been remembering more of the good stuff - including the miracles.

One of them happened while he was still an infant, and who knows what might be merely coincidence.

On this particular night, my dad ran into my bedroom and told me to get up and get out of the house, because it was on fire.  I jumped up and ran to my bedroom door.  I could feel the heat and almost see the smoke.  I saw my older brother and my mother with my baby broter wrapped in a blanket.  We rushed out the back door and down the street to our neighbors (and closest friends at that time).  Dick, the man of that house, ran out as soon as we got there to help my dad. Mom and his wife Irene called the fire department.    My mother started to tell the strangest story.  She had been dreaming.  A very large, burly man was trying to break into our house.  She beat him to the front door and locked it.  He started for the rear of the house.  She beat him there, too so he started around to the side where the dining room stood, between the kitchen and living room.  There were windows all along that side of the room, only in her dream, the end near the living room was just open and exposed.  The man started walking into the house.  She woke up, terrified, and woke my dad, who calmed her down and told her it was only a dream.  They were almost back to sleep when they heard a rattling sound, right where the window was that was an unguarded, open space in her dream. They both jumped out of bed and saw smoke coming into the bedroom from the door into the living room

This house was an old southern raised cottage, with a brick foundation and a crawl space almost tall enough for a man to stand erect.  The house was heated by two floor furnaces, one of then at the conjunction of the living and dining rooms at the same exact point where mother's dream indicated an open and unprotected space. That floor furnace, for some reason, had caught fire, and the flames were coming up into the house.

We did not start to put the whole picture together until the firemen had come and gone.  By the time they arrived, Dad and Dick had it all under control.  There was a charred section of wood floor around where the furnace had been that had to be replaced, but that was the only damage to the house.  The firemen all said that it was a matter of minutes.  If my parents hadn't awakened when they did, and started working to put the fire out, that the whole huse would have been in flames.

The first thing everyon noticed was that the dining room drape, at that end of the room, had fallen.  The falling drape had apparently run along the wooden Venetian blind, causing the rattling sound that reawoke my parents.  The next day, Dad decided to rehang the drape.  He looked for the hook the drape had been hung upon, assuming that it must have fallen from the wall but didn' find it.  He assumed that it had probably been washed out of the house while he and Dick were fighting the fire, so went to his toolbox for another hook.  As he climbed the ladder to replace it, he was shocked to find the hook still securely in the wall.  For the drape to fall, it had to come up and out, for some unexplained reason, and then shifted back so that it rattled the blinds as it fell.  Dad was an engineer.  He knew how unlikely that would be, but it was apparently what had happened.

There were other instances ove the next seven years, not quite as remarkable, but still very, well, synchronistic - though I didn't know the word at the time.

After Bob died, we moved out of that house, and thigs were never the same again.

Our family had never been "normal," but the years Bob was with us were the happiest, however you might look at it.  It took me a lot of years to come to terms with it all.

Today, I feel that things and people come into our lives for a reason.  I don't know why we were so blessed to have his brief presence in our lives, but I know he was somebody very special.

Thank you for sharing such intimate thoughts.  That's very courageous not knowing who is lurking.  I have been more careful in recent years that when I originally started posting.  It is the intimate thoughts that connect people, the ones hardest to share.

Your mother's dream and the fire remind me of a very pragmatic friend of mine whose family lived in a nice home in New Jersey.  They had their share of family issues that created chaos but it was a family with love.  She firmly believes from her childhood and young adult memories that the house was haunted.  Now, this is a woman who barely has a spiritual side and certainly does not believe in anything mystical or occult.  She is practical, very intelligent and competent.

Thanks  for the response, DK.  Yes, I get that I'm talking to the whole wide world of the internet web, but I don't think I said anything problematic. and agian, judging by the numbers, it doesn't look like anyone looked in, members or guests.

As you said, sometimes its just important to connect.

So, thanks again.

Here's a happy Bob story.  He was about 6; Bill would have been 15.  The two of them shared a bedroom, so the afternoon that Bill and a couple of his friends set up a table to play Blackjack, Bob stayed in the room to read but spent more time just watching the big guys play their game.  After a while, he went to his desk, opened a drawer and pulled out a small handful of coins.  He went to the table and asked if he could play, too.  "You play Blackjack?" the friends asked.  "Do now.  I've been watching." "Got any money?" He held up his handful of coins.  "Fifty seven cents."  Bill broke in, "Hey Bob, this is a serious game..." but the friends stopped him, winking at and nudging each other, "No, Bill, lets let him play - as long as his money lasts, anyway."  So Bob  pulled up a chair, sat down at the table, and put his coins in front of him.  After the dealer had dealt the first round, Bob looked at his hole card, then, with a very bland expression, looked at the dealer and said, "Hit me."  When the dealer dealt his next card, he looked at it briefly and said, with that same bland expression, "I'll stick."

Guess who cleaned out whom that afternoon.

The very best of angels all have a little bit of devil in them.