Theatre of the Absurd

It’s currently 5:45 AM and my mind is all over the place, even more so than usual. Normally this hour of the day is a time for the sorting out of things, since I always awaken with dozens of competing ideas jockeying with each other for my attention. Surely I am not the only one this happens to, right? Doesn’t everyone wake up to a subconscious run on sentence with sixteen subjects, eleven verbs, and more semi-colons than you can count? Coffee helps, oddly enough. Then, by the time I step out of the shower, things have settled down. For now, its like a monkey juggling chainsaws up there. So, I’m just going to go with it...

My daughter and her husband closed on their first house yesterday. Right after they were handed the keys Kaitlin sent me a text:

So, we wired $**,*** to our attorney today.

I read the line several times and then remarked, “That sentence is quite a thing to hear from the mouth of one’s child.”

Yesterday Pam and I secured a rental on Quantabacook for three weeks next July, giving us five weeks in a row on our favorite lake from July 3 thru August 7. When we shared the news with our kids, the most enthusiastic response came from my daughter-in-law, a girl who had never traveled north of Tennessee before marrying my son. It is a beautiful thing when you discover that both your daughter-in-law and son-in-law have fallen head over heels for Maine just like the rest of us. How dreadful would it be if they hated lake living?

We all love Fall, the colors, the cooler temperatures that arrive after the blistering heat of summer. But eventually the colors fade to brown and everything withers away, leaving homeowners the ridiculous task of gathering the dead. My yard has lots of trees, and for about a six week period which begins the first of November, they all shed their leaves in great annoying waves. As they do you find yourself on the horns of a dilemma. You could ignore it. Why gather up leaves until all of them have died? What’s the point of slaving away out there when as soon as you have finished, you wake up the next morning to a fresh coating of death and decay? Well, your brain suggests to you, if you wait six weeks to get them up they will be a foot deep and it will take you forever! Besides, your neighbors will become annoyed with you every time they walk by your house and see the mess! So, I trudge out there every four or five days and rake them up, stuff them in giant black plastic bags, waiting for the great collection day, when my County comes around and throws all my stuffed bags in a giant truck and speeds them away to the landfill. Henrico County has decreed that my neighborhood has to wait until December the 14th for this blessed event. By that time I will have at least 50 bags. Beautiful.

Ran across this Far Side the other day...

This is a perfect summary of 2020. Certainly, this entire comic opera of a year has all been a fantastic misunderstanding. 

How great is this? Every speaker’s nightmare.

Then there’s this from the Worksgiving celebration at my office yesterday...

Just a little something I like to call the COVID CAFE.

Oh, and Pam made this last night...

One last thing, our church has a new Sacraments protocol in place for the remainder of the year...

So, there you have it. Just a brief glimpse into the theater of the absurd  that is my brain at 5:30 in the morning.

P.S.