Well. This is embarrassing.

No sooner do I make a commitment to posting for 31 days, than I go AWOL for twice as long as I ever put anything up here. Sort of like an extended blackout period.

Not that anyone cares about the reasons, but here’s a little of what was going on during the Time of Darkness:

I caught a cold. I went on a trip to the Mainland to visit my daughter. I came home, and for the past week have experienced what I’ve come to think of as The Pit of Despair (Thanks to the cold, I even sounded a little bit like The Albino).

I tried to talk myself into climbing up out of it; that made it worse. So I’m still sort of in the pit. And I still have the cold.

Speaking of depressing, how about this post? Fourteen days of silence and now this. Sheesh.

Anyway, during the Time of Darkness I was still remembering stuff, but somehow unable to write about any of it. The posts have just existed in my head, but if I’d actually written them, some of them might have been about:

• My dad: he loved to eat, and loved all kinds of food, except one: oatmeal. How he never called it anything except “mush,” which used to crack me up, and how his dislike of it had to do with having had to eat so much of it — or a really bad version of it — growing up on a farm in Kansas;
• My little four-foot-eleven German grandmother: she not only was the size of a preteen, she often acted like one. She roller skated and jumped rope with us, and took us (well, me — I don’t remember my brother being along on those journeys) downtown to eat lunch — which included an ice cream soda — at the Kress counter, then bought us palm leaves at Alexander Young Bakery;
• My German grandfather: a big, bald, barrel chested man with a booming voice, he took me shopping downtown on Fort Street at the end of summer and let me pick out any dress I wanted for the first day of school;
• Mrs. T: she was the mom of my brother’s best friend, and one time we drove over to their house to pick up my brother, and she came out to talk to my mom. But she was embarrassed that she had curlers in her hair, so before coming out the door she grabbed a quilted toaster cover and put it on her head, then carried on a perfectly normal conversation with my mom;
• My Uncle Charley: one time he hid in the brush along the trail we were hiking to Sacred Falls and snorted like a wild boar. The four of us kids simultaneously screamed, jumped five or ten feet straight up, and hightailed it back down the trail. There may have been a pair or two of wet pants in the group, and not from the waterfall;
• One of my first ASL teachers, Georgia: she was a pretty respectable teacher of sign language, except that her hands had a tendency to flutter, somewhat birdlike, in a way that often made her signs difficult to understand. It was bit frustrating for us novice signers. One of my deaf friends said it was just Georgia’s “accent;”
• One of my high school classmates was a star running back who held the state record for most yards in a season for a couple decades. He went on to star at USC and then a career in the NFL. When he arrived at our school in 8th grade, everyone thought, judging by the chin whiskers, that he was in the wrong place; one of our teachers tried to show him how to get to the high school part of campus.

So that’s about all I can come up with for now. I hope to be exiting the P of D before too much longer. I also hope to get back on track with the remembering, but I suppose it probably wouldn’t be a good idea to promise anything.

By the way, the rainbow over Diamond Head up there isn’t there for any particular reason, except that when I was on the mainland and trying really hard to come up with something, I uploaded it into the draft just to have something to look at. It’s possible that triggered a little bout of homesickness, which on top of the cold and the P of D made it not such a great idea. But now you know what the western view from my back yard looks like on a rainy morning.