Sad/Glad

Here’s an update:

I called one of the girls at Gorgi’s BBQ about the manager’s heart attack on Saturday. She tells me that he remains hospitalized breathing via a ventilator. He is ok although the outcome for him remains iffy.

The judge released my youngest daughter from jail Monday and set a trial date for her in a couple of months. She said she’s going out of town to relax and reevaluate things for a day or two.

93 e-mail messages clog my inboxes, most of it forwarded cutesies.

The Samuel Ward Diary still hangs fire. I have not had the heart to open it, much less work on it, since last week’s discovery.

Sleep deprivation guides my life at the moment; I blunder about in a stupor. Disturbing dreams wake me each night after just a few minutes sleep — not nightmares, just upsetting dreams.

For instance, years ago I had a nodding acquaintance with James Robertson Ward, a noted writer and historian who wrote Old Hickory’s Town, the definitive history of Jacksonville. His monumental series on the route of the King’s Road was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

Well, on the night of Monday, July 23^rd, (this was three days before I realized my fatal error I’d made preparing the Samuel Ward Diary) — That night I dreamed I was working on some book at my computer when I heard a knock at the front door. When I opened it, there stood James Ward saying that his house had caught fire and burned down. He announced that he was moving in to live with us. In the driveway behind him stood a tractor-trailer truck overflowing with scorched and soggy books, salvaged from his extensive library. The workers with him began unloading all those books into our living room!

That woke me up.

You don’t have to be Jungian to see a connection between my working on that 16^th Century diary of Samuel Ward, and my dream about eminent historian James Robertson Ward moving permanently into our living room.

See what I mean about disturbing dreams and sleep depravation?

I can’t think straight. I have no spirit for work. Today I whiled time away playing a game of on-line strip poker with three virtual ladies.

I lost my shirt… Actually I lost a whole lot more than my shirt and the fully-clothed virtual ladies around the table laughed me to scorn.

It’s sad when you’re laughed to scorn by colored pixels.

Does all this sadness mean that joy has fled my life?

Doesn’t the Scripture say, the Joy of the Lord shall be your strength.

Not that anyone has ever called me giddy, but today I’m not happy, happy, happy.

Yet there does remain a slow undercurrent of gladness.

Gladness mixed with bone-deep weariness — the kind of gladness you feel when you’ve stood at the bus stop for 45 minutes and finally see your bus coming into view three blocks away — That kind of gladness.

For today, it’ll do.