Diary of a LAN Manager

Here I stand again, speaking to an empty room. My thoughts aren't worth the cyberspace they would take up if I cared to tweet or post to Facebook, but here I stand anyway. I had no idea how long it had been since my muse had forced me to write. I used to write almost daily, poetry mostly, when I was younger and believed that someone cared what I had to say. I wanted to be e.e. cummings or T.S. Eliot or anyone who seemed to be so comfortable in his own skin to pour out his emotions onto a blank page. It took me a few years to realize that the writers who filled my pantheon of literary deities were not that comfortable after all, but wrote because not writing was more painful than the spilling of emotion. So I think I will take up my keyboard once more, wade out into the battle, and write.

Spring made a brief appearance in Nashville, then proceeded to try to wash us down the Cumberland before exiting somewhere mid-May and letting summer in early. We skipped June and July and proceeded straight to August - or at least the heat would lead you to believe it. Time passes in such a blur. My youngest turned twenty, my nephew turned one, and it's been a year since Momma passed away. I try not to dwell on it, honestly. But some days are harder than others. Mother's Day was hard. Her birthday was hard - even my birthday was a little tough to get through, considering that all I could seem to think about was that last year I spent my birthday in a funeral home. I think she would be laughing at me now, though, if she were here, as I try to tend to my mini-garden on the deck. Last year I got one lonely tomato from my two tomato plants; this year, I have enough green beans to almost be worth cooking up, but the tomatoes don't look promising at all. I think I'll go home

Four seventeen thirty-eight. No, these are not the winning numbers in the lottery; they are the words I heard my mother struggle to speak each time the various staff members at the clinic and in the hospital asked her to confirm who she was. Four seventeen thirty-eight. It was easier than trying to make them understand April, since the page they were looking at had the numeric convention of her date of birth. Four seventeen thirty-eight. April 17, 1938 was Easter Sunday. My grandfather was said to have called his firstborn his little Easter Bunny; my grandmother refused to let him name the child Bunny and settled on Bonnie instead. I don't remember my grandfather much, except that he had a huge smile, a booming laugh, and that he smoked cigarettes pretty much until his last day on earth in 1967 when he died of lung cancer. But I have no doubt that he loved his little "Bunny" very much, as did my grandmother. Because Easter is a moving holiday, it never fell on April 17th

On the ride into work this morning I let myself be lost in the foggy mist and enjoyed the last of the snow from this past weekend. It will no doubt be gone soon, soaked into the ground as if it never existed. Snow for me has always held a deeper meaning. I am happiest when it snows, yet I couldn't begin to explain why. So I looked out the window, imagining romantic characters striding across the pure white expanses, and just breathed in the beauty. Snow wraps around the seemingly dead landscape, and whispers promises of rebirth and renewal as it gently cradles the world in its soft, white blanket.

I thought about deleting all the past posts - none of them have any meaning to anyone but me anyway- but I couldn't do it. Let them sit there, unread and unremembered. There were no posts in 2009. There was nothing positive I could find to say, although there were happy moments mixed with the sad. The sweet mixed with the bitter. The birth of my nephew, the death of my mother, the numbness that followed, and lingers. The start of my journey towards an MBA, the job that no longer inspires me, the purchase of an Airstream to help bring me back to center. That was 2009. This is 2010. It's time to turn and face forward, and soldier on.

Bon mot for the day: We tend to live in the past when we can't see much of a future.