A Reflection of a Blue Life

I started a Facebook post this week by writing something about two years ago and found that it’s already been two years since our ‘re-living’ of a snapshot in time almost 40 years exactly to the day when it happened.  It was at a very special spot in Sedona by a bridge near the water we called our own as teenagers.

There were trees and sounds of the wind.  There were stocked trout, high-flying birds and a special lost wax ring which disappeared from a snow-covered slip in the stream, disappearing in the white crystals above the freezing water and was never to be found.  I remember the moment of loss so distinctly.  A truism of then and now.  I wouldn’t change one thing.

A few days ago as I was telling my storytelling and annoying a very good friend with meaningless chatter about a story and he stops me mid-breath with, , , wait for it.

“I never read that one.”

“What!” I voiced causing him to shrug.

So I reposted it on Facebook.  Received a bunch of likes and no haters.  I get haters sometimes about the diaries and my stories.  I don’t expect to get any on this post and if I did, I would delete them into the deleted hater bottomless chasm I dug by hand for haters.

The posting made me take a look back in time once again and wonder about what’s changed over time and where I’m at today and especially why.  A, ‘Time Travel Time’, of my own.  I thought how over these years together how she had become the dearest of my friends.  The friends who I call my Blue Men.  I have only a few.  Some don’t even know they are in the club.

Maybe they do.  Maybe they’ve sat back and said to themselves how they felt significant by changing me and I didn’t even know they did.  Maybe not.

Blue Men affect you by causing an effect in your life without knowing they’ve done so.  Much later you find out that if they hadn’t been there, life as you know it would be so different.  They then become Blue.  I hope I’m Blue to someone.

“If I’d never would have met her, I wouldn’t have never known him, if it had been, if I’d seen, if, , ,”  Now you got it?  Think significant.

What if I never knew Bobby, Johnny, Jerry, Craig’r, Dale, (he takes credit for diagnosing my germ I’m about to explain), Tony, Rhodes, Bob, Dave the Dude, Dad, Daniel, Lynze, Bailey, Joe, Bim, Virg, the 365 members, Mr. Theel, Mr Sinanovic and even more others like Bucky and those whom I accidentally have just forgotten today.

What about Pat, the in-law, who saved my life from the dreaded casket-bound chocolate-covered cherry bon bon trip I was choking to take?  Oh man, not to forget who is most important to me in this life being she is the first Blue Woman in existence?  What if I never knew them?  What if they weren’t my Blues?

 

Confusingly let us together look at the cause and effect.  You’ll soon understand.

Sadly, I’ve been poisoned my whole life by an affliction I can only call, ‘BadFirstJudgmentitis’.  It’s horrid.  Causes all kinds of side effects.  Symptoms can be devastating.

The first time I meet someone, my first judgement is always wrong.  Doesn’t matter when or where.

“You know, that guy’s a pretty nice guy,” I’d say, knowing secretly about my disease.  ‘Uh, oh.’ I’d think as the error-ridden judgment came out of my mouth.

Five days later he’s in the news and has done something unspeakable while his mug shot is plastered on the internet in the sidebar of the screen.

“Nope, don’t know that guy,” I’d say in avoidance.

 

Next person lines up in life, “Boy, what a dick!”  Excuse the language but it’s hard to get the point across with inserted symbols.

A month later I’m taking a trip or having dinner at The Blue Bar with him and for anyone to do that, they have to have a Golden Ticket just to even be invited there.  It’s that special.

I will never be rid of the terrible malady.

— Time Travel Time —

She sat with her three friends at the butcher block art table caring nothing of me and my three pasty immature self-defined pre-geeky friends.  I was eyeing her.

 

I leaned to my left to Chris, “See her?” I whispered the question.

“Which one?”

“The hot one, the blonde.  The hippie chick at the babe table,” I nodded in her direction.

“Yeah, what about her?”

“She’s so pretty,” I said.

Chris backed away as he leaned even further so his eyes would focus better, “She’s okay.”  I saw his eyebrows raise.

I instantly knew he was trying to throw me off and then he would pounce at the opportunity to meet her before I did.  She was that pretty.  I didn’t budge.

“I’m gonna date her then I’ll marry her,” I proclaimed.  “I will love her like no other.”

Chris refocused his eyes but this time on me and said,”You’ll need a head transplant and grow your hair long.  Plus you’re so skinny your 501’s only have one belt loop.  She can have any guy she wants as a boyfriend.”  He winked stupidly.

“Five bucks say you’re wrong,” I challenged.

“Deal!” Chris said as he slapped my hand on the table.

We shook hands in a goofy way and continued feeling for the solidified gum stuck underneath the tabletop for a chunk we could throw at the next table.

“She looks like a really nice person to me,” I judged for the first time.

Sadly I heard on a reunion site that Chris has passed without ever paying me my five bucks.  Shyster to the end.

You see, I did date her finally.  I did grow my hair long so I’d fit in with her friends who thought she had to be on hallucinogens to be a steady with me.  I couldn’t afford the head transplant but I did marry her, a brunette now, almost 47 years ago and that is how I figured out when I first became afflicted with the dreaded, ‘BadFirstJudgmentitis’ some 50 years ago.

 

I know pretty close to the day when I got sick.  I know this because I told Chris I thought she looked like a really nice girl.  I knew what I was doing then.

So in thinking back, the day my illness must have begun was sometime after that perfect day.  Sometime after the moment I met her.  Some other day than the day Chris and I had made our bet.  Someday later.

You ask yourself out loud, “Why would he know that?”  “How could he know that?”

Simple.  Because I was right that time.  Because today,

She is the bluest, of my Blues.

The End

“The best part of life starts at the top of the stretch.”

The WiseGuy

Click here to read more stories of The WiseGuy