Besides, too, too cliché, no? Digging to find the jewels. No, I needed something a bit more personal, some item that held meaning beyond what could be seen or sold. And out of nowhere (okay, well out of my way-back memory) came sparkly rocks! The perfect comparison I needed! Well, perfect except that no one else knows why sparkly rocks are so wise and important – so I thought I’d better go ahead and tell the story of me and my sparkly rocks.

Short story first,  I was surrounded by time, security, beauty, and silence (there is little I wouldn’t give for any or all of those now!) – and I was crabby, frazzled, having a bad, ungrateful, ungracious day, until…

It was about 15 years ago now, I guess. My younger self was full of energy; I had a good job that I hated, a nice 4-bedroom rented house, plenty of money (for our needs), limited family drama – and dreams and ideas and the wanting of something different and more were clawing up my insides, daily.

This particular day was a Central California Stunner. A bottle-blue sky washed in the light of a rare benevolent sun; the warmth of its rays slide gently along your skin as if preparing to gather you close into an embrace. A brief respite from its normal fire-spitting fury when, after one step into its heat, fears of your flesh shriveling up like one of our area’s famous raisins trot through your mind.

I was inside, though, in a quiet house I had all to myself for a few hours. My desk was situated, perhaps somewhat unwisely, at a point where I could look through the sliding glass door into a backyard of laden fruit trees. With a turn of my head I could look out a side window in the kitchen, right into the flower garden next door. What I lacked in the green-thumb department my neighbor more than made up for, for her garden was a joyful explosion of color and scents. (Unfortunately, her personality did not match this joy, but that’s okay; I just wanted to look at her public offerings, not drop in for tea.)

And there I sat in front of my computer, broody and discontent, frustrated because whatever I was working on – no doubt one of my many plans to save the world – just would not gel. I felt like growling at someone but there was no one around to growl at except Cat and, well, if you are a cat-knower then I don’t have to explain what a pointless growl that would be. I needed to do something;  I thought of knocking on my neighbor’s door just so her pained “Oh my God, there’s a Black person living next door to me!” smile-frown would give me a reason to sneer at her or something.

Then the doorbell rang. And, finally, my excuse. I hate doorbells! I am somewhat anti-social, don’t like unexpected visitors and I get annoyed when people ring my doorbell. I stalked to the door determined to break every rule of my upbringing – I was not, really not, going to smile at whoever was on the doorstep and say, with a fluting lilt, “Hellooo! How nice to see you!” or “May I help you?” if it’s a stranger. I was going to be rude and snap at someone. Finally!

I snatched opened the heavy wood door, only to find that some eight year old kid had walked right out of a Norman Rockwell painting and landed on my doorstep, rolled up jeans and plaid shirt and all. We stared at each other silently for a moment. The little white kids around here were more inclined to peek curiously at me than to come right up to my door.

Now, believe me when I tell you that I could have resisted his tousled red-gold curls (even if I am a sucker for redheads); the freckles spattering his face, making his clear green eyes seem greener? no problem, a dime a dozen; even the wide, fearless “I am your friend, are you my friend, too?” smile could (really!) have left me cold. But then I glanced down at the box he held in his hands, at the contents and then at the hand lettered sign taped crookedly to the front – “Sparkly rocks for sale! 25 cents each” – and my traitorous defenses just fell.

“Hi, sweetie,”  I fluted. “May I help you?”

He held the tattered box up a bit higher. “Do you want to buy a sparkly rock?”

Jeeze, even his voice, that slightly husky, Spanky and our Gang boy-voice, was conspiring against me.

“Um…” I made sure to gaze intently only at his sparkly rocks, and not at the dozens decorating areas of my backyard, and side and front yards.  White sparkly rocks seemed to be the ground-cover of choice in this neighborhood and I was pretty sure a backyard was where he got those.

I loved it! Talk about chutzpah, this kid was filled to the brim with it.

“I’ll take two. Hold on just a moment,” as I rushed to grab a couple of quarters, because obviously if this kid (who I had never seen before, and never saw again) was selling readily available rocks, there had to be something special about these particular ones.

“You can pick out whichever ones you want,” he offered generously, after I handed over the coins. I poked through the box until I found two that felt just right. They nestled warmly in the palm of each hand, were white with  black striations through them and sparkled all over when held up in the sunlight. Surely magical rocks, these.

The boy gave me one last brilliant, snaggle-toothed smile before heading down the street, presumably to ring the doorbell of the next house.

Me, I took my rocks and settled them on the counter where the light streaming through the windows set the sparkles dancing, then sat back down, laughing, to work.

I don’t know where my rocks are now; too many moves since then. The magic of them, though, continues. I only have to think of them or of that audacious little boy, with his offerings of dreams and boldness, bright in the sunlight on my doorstep, to remind me to laugh, to dream big, and to smile when I knock on scary doors.

To make a change from the regular cold or flu that’s been hanging around all winter, a little stomach bug walked in the house with one of my grandchildren last week, when they returned from a few days spent at their dad’s house, and it’s jumped from person to person over the past seven days, with sometimes devastating effect.

This is why I really haven’t written anything since then – little time, but also whenever I sat down all I wanted to do was whine and moan and start comparing 2 year olds to Linda Blair and title posts “The House of Barf” and who in the world would want to hear all that? So, I refrained from imposing my misery on anyone else. Almost

Little writing, but I’ve been doing a lot of reading and thinking and stuff, so time (such as there was) was not wasted I don’t think. I have, for one thing, a Plan! Not quite sure for what yet. Well, yes I am sure, but since I distrust both plans and sureness (surety?), particularly those arising from thoughts of escaping sick kids and adults, I’ll just go ahead let it simmer a bit in my mind.

Anyway, at least from my reading I’ve come across a few things I want to write about (that have nothing at all to do with barf or poop), so now that I have a Plan, all I need is a Schedule and I’ll be good for at least a week or two.

Anyway, I thought I had found it yesterday. A line of a poem by Langston Hughes just sort of leaped out at me and I thought “That’s it!”.  I loved the sound of it, the lyricism – though it was a few words long. Still, it had the feeling I was looking for, and it even incorporated the “sun”, which has been part of our logo since the beginning! How perfect was that?

Except. A couple of hours later I was warmly thinking of our new name, and then… um, what was it again? How did it go, exactly? I looked it up again and, oh yeah! That’s it, beautiful and perfect.

Only, just now I again tried to recall the words, the sequence, the beauty – and I can’t remember a thing about it, except that it has “sun” in it.

Now, this could be a sign that age has gripped my brain and just refused to let go – or, more likely, a good sign that I should keep looking for that perfect name. If even I can’t remember it, how could I expect my readers to?

Sigh.

Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, the train station sign for which is posted above, is the name of a town in Wales. It reportedly means "St. Mary’s Church in the hollow of white hazel near a rapid whirlpool and the Church of St. Tysilio near the red cave.", so you can see why they wanted to shorten it a bit…

That’s my plan, though I am not under any illusions that it will be easy. Good news des not always jump into your face like bad does. Necessary, though, for me. Blogging about politics or news events is often, if not depressing is at least um… well, depressing. In the other meaning. Not particularly buoyant to the spirits, I guess.

So I figure that if at either end of the writing day I deliberately turn my mind to looking up, seeking out the positive, being downright sappy or woowoo if that’s what it takes, it’ll help to mitigate whatever other effects events have left behind.

Now when I sat down to write this I didn’t have anything positive in mind – until I reread the first five words: wake up in the morning.

Well, there we go – it’s a start, yeah? Even if it’s the evening or afternoon, waking up at all, even to dreadful circumstances, is a good beginning.

Or can be. I know some would rather not wake up at all if what is ahead is what they’ve left behind, but I guess I’m a subscriber to the “where there is life there is hope” school of thought. Easy indeed for me to say, never having faced an unimaginably bad day.

Then again, what is “unimaginably bad” is relative, I suspect. Some of my (thankfully past) days would send others completely around the bend.

Anyway, for me, today, waking up this morning into my imperfect and sometimes very annoying life is my positive, hopeful thing of the start of the morning. Some of what happens throughout the rest of the day is beyond my control; most everything else is up to me.

There. Kinda scary but still positive, no?

“Interesting times” indeed, these last couple of years of my life. Me, I’m ready for plain old boring for a while.

ETA: One thing that I noticed, when I could sign on and read everything online, but not participate in the conversation without a *lot* of hassle is that it’s pretty boring now, just reading. I mean, still the same interesting stuff but… just not *as* interesting, since I couldn’t add my own thoughts. Which is odd cuz I rarely comment anywhere anyway, so you’d think it wouldn’t matter much. I’m going to try and change that behaviour though, and participate more now that I realize how important it is to my enjoyment of the web and such.

Also, because I couldn’t type, it seemed to me that I should at least attempt to write some other way so I picked up an actual pen and paper and really did try… but I’m just not used to that anymore. Maybe cuz it’s slower and so my thoughts are held up by my need to make the writing legible or maybe it’s just that it’s so unfamiliar to me now, actually writing things out but I found myself not doing much more than dashing off notes on things.

Better than nothing, I guess, and a start.