Life Unraveled

During the summer of 2019, a few short months before my Mom passed away, I returned to my hometown for a visit.  I don’t recall much about the time spent there, save for one small event.  I went with my mom to the beauty shop to meet “the girls”, as she called them.  One of those girls I already knew by name—Susie—because that name was revered like royalty around these parts.  Susie was the woman who did my mother’s hair every Wednesday.  The artist who patiently washed, combed, curled, and teased Ma’s hair every week like clockwork, faithfully constructing the dark bouffant hairdo that was as much a part of my mom’s persona as any other physical trait she possessed on Earth.   When Ma was sick in 2017 and laid up in the hospital for several weeks, there was only one person she kept nagging at me to call.  I heard it over and over.  “Paul, call Susie.  Tell her I am desperate for a wash!  Call her, Paul!”  And trust me, she said this with as much gusto as anyone who had just spent two

I normally consider myself to be a fairly reflective person.  I enjoy looking back over life and gluing the jumbled-up pieces of living back together to more clearly discover the full picture of how exactly I got to where I am now.  I know that the past is done.  I am not a fan of trying to rediscover that which made me happy at one moment in time, only to drag it kicking and screaming into the now.  That always feels cheap to me and more than that, it never works anyway.  But for the sake of this little post, with my 48th birthday staring me in the face and not having written on this blog for nearly a year, I have deemed it as good a time as any to lightly retrace the paper trail of how I got to this place in my journey. I vividly remember what I was doing last March 18th to celebrate my 47th revolution around the sun.  COVID lockdown had just started in the Bay Area, where I was living at the time.  I don’t have to tell anyone how frightening and unnerving that particular period of t