A Grand Feeling

Who knows why, really, rather obscure memories sometimes just pop into our heads? 

Yesterday and without any obvious prompting I remembered buying $100,000 candy bars, now called 100 Grand, at the bookstore at the University of Detroit as a freshman 47 years ago. They were a quarter each at the time. I would buy four and savor them over the course of a day. 

The memory came out of nowhere and was so strong I could damn near taste the chocolate and crisped rice. A happiness flowed over and through me which was virtually indescribable. I truly felt like I was back in the Student Union building on campus enjoying a quiet moment between classes. It was that powerful and sublime.

I wasn't in a party store and I wasn't hungry.  Indeed I had no desire for a snack at all. There were no ads in the paper I had just read and the radio was not on to perhaps have set things in motion. I was sitting at my desk at the Shop waiting for a customer to arrive, sipping on a coffee. Then suddenly I was at old U of D and feeling very good about it.

It's a feeling I cannot recreate with any satisfaction even as I try to this morning. I can't come near it. But man, it was profound and powerful and I simply have no clue what triggered it.

Joe's Mulberry Tree

I wrote yesterday of the high winds and storms which caused a power outage in Woodbridge, my neighborhood in Detroit. I was going for the joke then, but today I feel more serious. You see, one of the casualties of the storm was me Grandpa Joe's mulberry tree.

I've written here:

https://thesublimetotheridiculous.blogspot.com/2017/06/mulberry-season-2017.html

of Joe and the mulberries. One of my fondest memories was watching him stop as he walked along the alley near the Shop and picked at the mulberries when they were in season. He was like a kid, he really was, in taking a minute and eating a few of those berries as he went by. I wonder what youthful memories it brought back to him...

That particular tree was little more than a bush in those days, and you could readily pick hundreds of mulberries as they were in easy reach. I still picked them until a year or two ago, when the growing process took the last of the easy pickings out of reach.

It was blown over by the wind sometime Tuesday night, and now will have to be cut into pieces and dispensed with. 

Joe was an ornery, cantankerous old coot in many ways. And the mulberry bush-then-tree simply a common sight in the alley. Yet the two together formed a lasting image which shall always live in my mind. It is a great insight into all which is good in the world. 

Grandparents

Me Grandma Hutchins, we lost her in 1979. I believe it was June 18. It was something like that anyways.
I took the call from me Pops. He told me she had passed away. I remember my life was different after that. I remember feeling weird, lost, after that call. It was a bit after mid-day.
Apparently he had called his folks, me Grandpa Joe and me Grams, either right afore or after he had called home, where I and me older brother and just younger sister stayed while everyone else had went down south to North Carolina that year. It still seems surreal.
I had little reaction. I told me sibs. Then I went to the Shop, where me Grandpa Joe waited, alone for whatever reason, pulling on a cigarette, a Carlton, as he sat by the coffee table. I went back to work, just like that, like normal.
Seeing as Joe had a coffee, I made me one. And we sat.
Joe pulled again on the cigarette. "I'm sorry about your grandmother," he said, unusually quietly, after a minute.
"Thanks," I said. I sipped at my coffee.
After a bit I said, "Well, not many get to have four grandparents until they're 19. I guess I'm lucky."
"Yeah," Joe said. He pulled again at his Carlton.
And we sat there. We just sat.
Memories.