bubbles...

...ever since I can remember, I have had a wandering mind. I would bet, given the appropriate professional diagnosis, that i suffer from one of the alphabet disorders. ADD, ADHD, EIEIO, etc...it really doesn't matter...my mind wanders. I can be in the midst of the most enthralling book, the climax of a thrilling movie, just about anywhere....and an image of a grilled cheese sandwich I ate in Nashville TN will flash into my mind. I have always associated these with the image of a "bubble" bursting in my mind, releasing some random thought, some vintage picture, some long-ago memory, into the stream of the here and now. They carry no real relativity to anything in the present, no sub-conscious context to an unspoken dream. Just a ramdom thought. I used get annoyed when a bubble burst. It seemed to work counter to an efficient mind, blurring the sight of the present. It was, I guess, an irritation at best.

Seems that things have changed a bit.

I remember my wife and I having one of our "won't it be great" discussions when we first were married. You know, "won't it be great when our kids are grown and we actually have 2 pennies to rub together for warmth"...stuff like that. Her comment at the time was "won't it be great when the majority of our memories are from the time we are together, rather that the time we didn't know each other", or something to that effect. It's one of many things I filed away in my mind. You see, I really didn't know if I would ever get to a moment like that...someone looking back fondly at a memory that included me. I wasn't real confident that I could ever inspire that in someone. I didn't think that I would ever be that person...but I guess I was wrong. For, you see, I am getting to point in my journey that the bubbles that are bursting now seem to be primarily of the wonderful life God has seen fit to, for whatever reason, bless me with. I have been given the gift of a loving family, and now enough history with them to fill my days with wonderful bubbles....bubbles of my babies catching hold of my nose on the carpet, washing our big old Ford van on a hot day, my wife and I enjoying a cool drink at a pig roast on the strip in Carbondale....all random, but all so precious. Sometimes those bubbles are the only thing that get me through a particularly rough day at work, or more often, a long trip away from home. I cherish every chance to re-live each and every one of those memories...and hope that I can inspire those kinds of things in others. I want to be able to hold onto that....that every moment lived is a bubble for the future....and give each moment the chance to be special to me (and hopefully others) somewhere down the road...

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