Friday, June 30, 2017 Goofy Happy

Woke up feeling great!! What a great, great day yesterday!!! I’m still charged up and so blown away by that video.  I definitely feel like I’m on the exact right track.  I do a 30 minute session after morning prayers, get up and go to work in my office, and for the next few hours I’m in bliss – I can feel Irene in my heart and head. I’m beyond happy, I’m goofy happy, complete and joyful, we’re cracking jokes and talking about stuff we’ve been through and are going through, we talk about yesterday. I play the “I can’t wait” song and it repeats by itself (even though my player is set to “randomize”).  I stop it after the second play and applaud her for making it repeat. We have some more fun and I play the song again, but it doesn’t repeat, an Exile song starts up.

Now, Irene is a big Exile fan but I’m not. I think about stopping it but tell her “okay, but just this one, I’m not going to sit through an album’s worth of Exile songs.  Anyway the guy uses the phrase “you’re so fine” … I probably have 200 songs and I don’t remember ever hearing that phrase – although I know it’s the name of at least one old song and in several – it’s just not in any of my songs that I play.  The thing is, the first entry I made in my journal 3 days after I met Irene, I said the following after I talked about how much her attitude impressed me: “What I didn’t notice then was how pretty and fine she was.”  It was completely unlike me then and now to use that term to describe a woman.  That’s probably the only time I’ve ever done it.  And this song just said it, immediately making me think of that journal entry.

We laugh about it and I tell here I’m so impressed and proud of her, but no, I'm not playing any more Exile songs, and after a little while she tells me to stop working and go make breakfast for Gerra and Jace who have spent the night.  I want to continue working but she is insistent, telling me to do what you know you should instead of what you think you have to do.  Well that always trumps my arguments so I go in and start making bacon, scrambled eggs and biscuits. 

As I’m leaning over the sink washing something while cooking, the “I can’t wait” song is playing in my head and Irene makes me realize that the song is from her perspective – that she can’t wait until I "walk in the door", that she can’t wait for me to talk to her and tell her what is on my mind, and when I look her in the “eye”, I’ll be able to tell her I’ll never say goodbye.  It almost physically overwhelmed me how she expressed this to me. I was in tears with this strange but amazing emotion and looked up through the kitchen window.

Just outside the window we have a fig tree.  Sitting on a branch right in front of me were two small grey birds I didn’t recognize but it looked like one had a cardinal-like crown.  Neither had orange beaks, though.  I stood there staring wondering if they were cardinals (Irene and I had a long affinity to cardinals as being our spiritual “birds”, mine going back to elementary school).  As I watched this bright red cardinal landed on the branch and began feeding the two smaller birds!!!  I couldn’t believe it. The were baby cardinals from the male and female I’ve been seeing ever since Irene passed.  

I immediately thought about what Irene and I had talked about the day before – that it was okay for me to be just a father and a grandfather at times and not her grieving husband.  I was totally overwhelmed in love and gratitude and happiness. Had I not gone to make breakfast when she told me, I would never have seen it.  OMG what a morning!!! I am so at peace, excited, I feel so whole and complete. I need to remember this feeling!!!  To give me hope when I get to feeling bad.