Sometimes, my mind wanders off, and it begins to dig into the recesses of whatever substance it is that keeps piling up in the back of my brain, causing my head to tilt forward before I end up dosing off to sleep to create some of the wildest thoughts which then of course, turn into some of the more interesting dreams where I end up pulling the stripes off the Cheshire cat to knit them into booties for my feet. There I go again; it's thoughts like that....that keeps me awake!
There was a time when I was in my tender years when a big, bright, fluffy, beautifully pinkish tangerine flamingo flew overhead and landed in the space in front of where I was standing in what became a park, but at that time, was simply a patch of land that I didn't have any right to explore. I was trespassing if I was using the correct terminology, but to a seven or eight-year-old, the word is useless and, in fact, meaningless. What is trespass? I was crossing the field. Mind you, it was someone else's field, but it was a field.
The bird landed, and it began walking or strutting its way around the grassier parts of the field. It looked out of place, and you can imagine that it was, in fact, completely out of place. When I was that young, I resided in Bethany, Oklahoma, a place not known for its wateriness or flamingo-oriented spaces; it was almost urban. We had streets, houses, cars, people, dogs, and cats running around, but we didn't have tropical fowl flying over our heads and landing in our federally protected open fields.
That's when I had a thought that has never left me. I said to myself, since I was the only one there, that what I had just witnessed was amazing. Then, after I said it, I stopped my head from thinking about it, and I argued within that same head that what had happened was not amazing because birds do fly. What it was...was unusual. It did happen, and though it probably didn't happen very often, I could not say it was amazing. If the bird, I told myself, had done a backflip, something I knew I could do, that would be amazing. If I flew, which was something the bird could do, that, too, would be amazing. What I saw and what happened was unusual.
Before I could get close enough to really look at it, the thing lifted itself as gently and as beautifully as I had seen them do at the zoo -- so again, it wasn't amazing, but it was different from the everyday life I lived; which made it interesting as well as unusual. I remember running home to tell my mom and my brother and sisters. I saw my sisters first, who basically told me I was lying, and they hoped I got my mouth washed out with soap for it. My brother said it was cool, and my mother wanted to know exactly where it had happened, which I declined to be all that specific for reasons we won't get into - she was overly interested; we'll put it that way.
The thoughts I had then are indicative of some of the thoughts I have now - my mind is a place I very much enjoy visiting, and when I stop and play inside of it, well, that's fun...it's neither amazing nor unusual, but more along the lines of normal and recurring. I have one of the best advantages of being alone with my thoughts; I like me. We (me and I) get along well enough to hang out without needing anyone else barging in on our playtime.
If it seems odd to hear me say these things, you don't know me. Tomorrow, in just about an hour now, I'll turn 63 years old, but you'd never know it if you spent any amount of your time inside my mind -- only the endless and the untamed can enter because to be otherwise would keep you out of it in the first place. Happy Birthday to me!
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