Consanguinity

 When my family first moved here, there were 4.4 million people living in the entire state.  Most of the population was centered in Jacksonville, Tampa, and Miami.  The rest of the state, by and large, was hinterland.  Sundays were for "taking a drive."  The state was a magnificent checkerboard of lakes, swamps, peatlands, and large, dry, sandy hills where citrus grew, and magnificent white sandy beaches.  

Today the state population tops 23 million and is known for its offbeat characters.  I think that figure is correct.  This is my source (link).  

Some of my friends are not able to open the link because they are either technophobes or eschew social media.  I'm conflicted on the subject.  Not on the technophobic part.  Elders have a difficult time with technology.  It confuses them as it does my mother.  No, I mean the social media thing.  I have it, but I am not connected to any of my friends through it.  They are faux accounts that give me access to things I want to see.  Sometimes people discover my accounts as Tennessee just did.  He had sent me a link to an instagram thing, and I must have clicked on the wrong button and sent him an invitation to look at mine.  No problem, really, as I don't post anything that would indict me there.  

This site is the one I fear people finding.  Pictures are one thing, but narratives are something else entirely.  

In an effort to become more of the old "me" again, or I should say the younger "me," I went to the Pars Course for an outdoor cardio workout.  It is the same course I used to do with my mountain buddy oh so long ago, even before I was married.  It is a half-mile compacted dirt track with exercise stations. Back then, we used to run five hard laps with sooooo many push ups, pull ups, dips, squats, etc, that there was no hope of thinking about anything but the next stretch before you.  It was a psychic cleansing as much as a physical workout.  And there was the camaraderie.  For years now, I've done the track alone, and since my accident, the ferocity of the workout has lessened considerably.  This was my first time there since my hospital stay.  I almost lingered too long in the house and was becoming limpid when I glanced at the pictures of my former self on the kitchen blackboard.  Ho!  It worked.  I put on my exercise costume and headed out the door.  

I walked from station to station and did some exercises.  I thought I might run certain sections, but I was not ready for that.  It would have been a tragic mistake, I could tell.  Three laps then a walk to the overpass where I walked the incline and did the stairs once before returning to the car.  I'd made good decisions.  

And when I got back to my car, it began to rain.  I needed to stop at the grocers to get the makings of the evening meal I had told my mother I would cook--chicken thighs, great northern beans, onions, carrots, celery, and russet potatoes pressure cooked in most of a bottle of wine.  

When I got home, I showered and chopped and spiced and set the things to cooking in the InstaPot.  I wanted to go out adventuring to keep my youthful momentum, but the rain continued.  It would rain for the entire day.  What to do?

I pulled out boxes of prints I had made of life through the decades.  I began with my college years and the images I had scanned and made digital in the early part of this century.  I haven't looked at those pictures for a long time, photos I made in college, both before and after I began to study photography in my spare time, taking courses outside my zoology curriculum.  There were some very good photos there.  I wondered about the kids I'd been in photo classes with.  I was good.  Some of them were better.  Most were art majors, of course.  They would be old now.  I wondered if they had continued to make photographs or if that was something they left behind at some point in their lives.  I wondered if they had kept their old photos and if they, too, pulled them out of closets or down from the shelves to view their former glories.  I can't even remember most of their names now, certainly not full names.  Here and there a first name, maybe.  Jack.  His father was an attorney who owned most of part of a small town's coastline next to Cape Canaveral.  He was a glitter/glamor kid, handsome, fey, spoiled by money.  He had me help him photograph a personal project, his fictional suicide.  He climbed into a white bathtub and smeared ketchup over his arms and into the water.  It seemed a good project for him.  He always appeared world-weary, though it could have been the partying and the drugs.  

If I could remember his last name, I'm sure I could find him.  He may have become King of the Space Coast.  

Or not.  One never knows.  

Toward five, I put on my Barbour Waxed Cotton Rain Jacket that was given to me as a present by me ex-wife one mid-week evening after she moved in but before she insisted we marry.  

"I was going to give this to you for your birthday, but I just couldn't wait!"

Fun days.  I was wishing for a Range Rover to go with it back then.  

The rain was coming down as I schlepped the entire InstaPot to the car.  Back to the house for a bottle of wine.  The drive through deserted flooded streets, me in no hurry at all.  

Dinner was fine and good, and it made my mother happy.  After eating, we sat outside in the open garage and chatted in the cool dampness of the coming evening.  

Later, at home on the big leather couch in the t.v. room, I got a call from my California mountain buddy.  He was calling from his camping spot in Mammoth.  He was worried about one of our old buddies, a former engineer for NASA who ran marathons, trained by not eating all day, running ten miles after work, and then drinking two bottles of wine with his cheese and apple board.  He was and is off the chart strange.  You've seen him in my "Dancing Larry" videos, I think.  

"He's losing his memory," my friend said.  "We were talking about a place he used to go to a lot, a place he loved to visit, and he couldn't remember ever being there.  And he wasn't even drunk!"

I wondered how much of the life I remembered was simply through photographs and journals and the bits and pieces of paraphernalia to which I have clung.  

Later that evening, I watched an episode of "The Bear."  Strange, lonely people whose family are the people they work with.  It is a show for the estranged, I think.  But you know me.  My eyes were damp.  Silly emo.  

My little village was an outpost from growth for most of my life here, but looking back through those old photos, the ones I took just after college graduation, I could see the change.  That Pottery Barn picture at the top of the page was once The Colony Theater.  I spent much of my high school years watching movies there.  The building is owned by my former girlfriend's father.  Everywhere I go in this village. . . "there is always something there to remind me."

Life isn't static, of course, but I have been informed by Faulkner's work that the past never lets go of the present.  It remains, a consanguinity.  

But life is for the living, so I'd better begin.

I still hope that maybe one day, I might get that Range Rover.