It is a beautiful day here in Sweetwater Corners, especially if you happen to be extremely fond of freezing rain and clouds settled in at around 100 feet or so. However, having once been a very frequent flyer on a number of different airlines we happen to know the ultimate truth about rainy days and Sundays and they never get us down. We know that "UP THERE" the sun is always shining. It is a great secret that I cling to on what other people may call miserable days. Every time I strapped into yet another aluminum tube for a daytime flight on a lousy day with a hundred or two other people and held on tight and exhaled as we hurtled down the runway so that I would be lighter and help the Pratt& Whitney or GE engines haul our collective asses into the sky. Every single time. I clung to the certain knowledge that we would soon break through the clouds that were unloading rain/snow/sleet onto those poor unfortunates we left behind to reveal...... Mr. Sun. My close personal friend.
Happiness and smiles would spontaneously break out amongst all present who were not suffering from a hangover. You could pick those types out fairly easily, invariably adorned with sunglasses, you could catch them lunging for the shades to cover their own personal porthole on heaven so they could hide and revel in their darkness, their pain and their "special" situation. All things considered, at these times, I would rather be me. The optimist, the collector of precious moments.
This little "secret" is marked in my remember box as a precious thing, something that I could count on when I needed something solid to cling to. That is not a bad definition of precious, is it? Preciousness is a very subjective thing but also something that you can be overjoyed to find yourself suddenly sharing with another person or even a hundred or two at any given moment.
Mrs. Geek and I had a too rare chance to share some of our personal precious things recently when we ventured forth beyond the boundaries of Sweetwater Corners to the far western reaches of the land known as Brampton Flats to Casa Ricketts for an intimate dinner party with some of our favourite people in this galaxy. There really is nothing like good company, old friends, great food, a few laughs, some great music and maybe a little bit of embellishment of the historical record if you can get away with it amongst folks who were with you "way back then". Conversation is littered with qualifying precis like, "remember when?" or "I remember......" , often followed these days by seemingly long periods of sometimes painful silence while internal search engines struggled to reach out and snatch the right remember box in a grey matter warehouse filled to overflowing with 6 decades or so of important "things" to remember.
Eventually, it floats or is hurled to the surface and more then once someone blurts out something like, "FRANCKS!!!, it was DON FRANCKS that I was trying to think of", even though "trying to think of" was eleven minutes ago and we were now talking about old bar hopping haunts instead of old/once young actors who went native on us and blew a great career. It took me almost 20 minutes to come up with the wrong name, ("Pete Frampton") as the author of the Rock Opera Tommy, and another 20 hours to figure out that I should have said Pete Townshend of The Who. Fortunately, and this is really important, the folks I was with either did not know, or pretended not to know, the difference and left my ego and mental state unchallenged. Bless them for that!
I learned a little bit about precious things this night. Gold don't cut it, diamonds are just pretty stones, and money doesn't really matter. Other things add up to precious.
Things like:
A couple of former room mates posing for posterity......
Now that is precious....
A good belly laugh and tears in your eyes........
Great to see.....
A good friend feeling comfortable enough to flash you a great smile.........
Even though she can't find her glasses and may not know who she is smiling at.....
Posing for the money shot.....
Hosts Nancy and Rich Ricketts with Karyl and John giving it up for a Kodak moment.
Everybody wants in on the act.....
Marvin The Ham, (NOT Hamlisch), with his truelove Fran and the aforementioned Karyl/John.
Fran looking very happy.....
Today, RIGHT NOW, these are precious things to me. I will cling to them and remember them, for moments like this are every bit as uplifting and spirit replenishing as that first glorious burst of sunshine when that aluminum tube bursts through the cumulus layer to bring joyous wonder to those who are paying atttention, and blessed respite from the rain, the sleet, the snow and the dark cloudy days that we left behind, either below on the ground or in the past.
Thank you Ricketts,
You are Precious People.