Pretty Sure

A few years back the wife and I went to Disneyland with some friends and the usual happi-wonderment ensued. We caught a show at one end of the park and then had to hot-foot it to main street so we could watch the fireworks. Of course, the square in front of the castle was packed by the time we got there.

We carefully hopped a fence into one of the planters (careful not to damage the happi-wonderment landscaping) and stood under a tree - it was a close as we could get.

You read that right - we stood UNDER A TREE to WATCH FIREWORKS by straining to see through the branches. The music swelled, the bombs exploded, the crowd oohhed and aaahhhed all the way to the finale when we all burst into applause. At which point, having only seen snippets of the show from my vantage I exclaimed, "WOW! I'm pretty sure that was awesome!" We still laugh about it today.

But that's life lately - one significant exploding burst followed by another - all obscured by the in-your-face stresses of daily life.

Everything I said back then goes doubly now.

Just in the last six weeks there have been births and deaths and funerals and holidays, plane trips and "I'll take the job" and "I am giving my notice", and rain and power outages and a half-flooded family room.

I like to stop and ponder these happenings from time to time and put pen to paper here on the ol' blog but lately it has been one continuous fireworks show. There is no time to stop, turn to your neighbor and discuss the latest burst of brilliance because if you do, you will miss the next one.

So we stand and strain and ooh and ahhh and with some luck we find ourselves at the end surrounded by friends on main street, laughing and applauding and "pretty sure that was awesome". Try and discuss it after the fact and there is no point - it all was too fast and too brilliant and it is impossible to put your finger on one moment and discuss it.

Of course, not all "bombs bursting in air" are friendly. Sometimes the explosions stop and you find yourself surrounded by friends picking up the pieces of what is left behind.

There is a scene in Band of Brothers where the troops are under fire, bombs are exploding all around them - the very trees are exploding - it is all light and dark and flashes and explosions and the deafening thunder of bombardment. One of the troops looks up from his foxhole and laughs because all he can think of is the beauty of the fireworks on the 4th of July: Watch up until the 1:40 mark to get the point (as you would expect, it gets graphic after that so you may want to stop there).



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9F1szmKOa8&feature=player_embedded

Life is both awesome and terrifying at times - but there is no time to blog about it because amidst all the beauty, we are hanging on for dear life.

All that is a long way around to saying, "Sorry I haven't written more - I'll try to write more."

The new job should make it a little easier to do so from time to time. My last day is today! My first day is Monday!