2005-04-20 - 4:44 p.m.

So picking up where we left off..

The plane hits ground with a little bit of a bounce causing at least half the plane to mumble, "Oohhhhhh." The rest of us (some who have resigned fate to do as it pleaes with our fragile lives (me) and others who have indulged in the pretty little $6 bottles of various "flying-aids") simply nod and wait for the pilot to pull his shit together and bring us down.

The plane lands, taxi's, and we watch the umbilical hallway extend out to the hatch.

I spend the first night with my brother, his fiance and my nephew. The first 3 hours I'm there we hunt imaginary zombies with plastic machine guns and throw grenades into the mouths of seemingly invincible demons. Eventually my knees are too bruised to keep up with boy so I head to bed.

Friday I travel to my grandma's house and spend the afternoon visiting with her and catching up on the important things in her life. The evening passes in the blink of an eye and as her speech gets drowsy, I send her to bed and retreat to the gas station/motel where the family is staying. Filled with an unusual resolve I vow to wake up at 6am and spend the entire morning before her b-day party mowing her multi-acre property.

6am comes and, as if by the hand of god, I spring out of bed, shower, and brave the chilly morning in shorts and an old t-shirt. The sun is barely peaking over the mountains as I fire up the old push mower and survey the sometimes 60 degree angles that I'll have to traverse. The property morphs back and forth from wide-open fileds to hilly terrain and damn near impossible to traverse patches of woodland.

Hours pass, and the sun continues to climb into the sky. With my IPOD set to random, I transfer all mental energy directly into the physical exertion of mowing this massive area. Problems become fuel for pushing and pulling the mower up the sides of hills, the troubles of my mind seep out of my pores in the guise of sweat and occasionally blood.

4 hours later, the work is as complete as one man with a push mower can make it. I'm satisfied with the work and it has (for the moment) removed some of the troubles from my poor mind.

I rush back to the motel, shower, and return to the Ocoee River State Park Convention Center to begin the set-up for the b-day party. My hands already blistering and bruised from the mowing, I lug tables and chairs back and forth across the room wincing from time to time as the pain bites into my palms.

A trickle of guests soon gives way to a tsunami (topical vocab, sorry) of friends and family, all eager to pay their respects to a woman with more guile, more strength, and more fearlessness then any man I currently know of. She sits with dignity, her posture picture-perfect (at 80 years old no-less!), and she receives each due-payer with patience and a warm smile. I spend the majority of the get-together chasing my nephew up and down the river as he bounds precariously from rock to rock. With my brother on important buisness in Atlanta, I play the surrogate father to this amazingly complex, occasionly demonic, perfect child. Which is fine by me. I've never been one for huge family gatherings. The impending mortality of the situation tends to upset me just a bit.

A DVD slideshow of 80 years of a life are shown and people tear-up and clap. 80 years summed up in a semi-professional powerpoint put to such classic ditty's as "Somewhere over the rainbow" and "In My Life."

The party ends, I spend another few hours packing things up, folding tables, etc.

I return to my brother's house for the last night. His finace goes to bed with the little monster and we're left to sit and chat like the old men we're rapidly becoming. He finds a few natty light bottles in the back of the fridge while I fish out some ginger ale to splah on my Jack. We listen to some of the discs I burned for him and do some general reminiscing. Automatic for the People is inevitable (somehow, of the hundreds and thousands of albums we've listened to, it is our favorite album!). The first song crackles and we spend the next 48 minutes analyzing every song, reliving the exact moments in time it evokes.

The night ends reluctnatly around 3am as I can no longer keep my eyelids pryed open. The next day I jump on the tiny bus in the sky and head back home. I return to find my workload has tripled and to my dismay, there is very little to look forward to in the coming weeks.

So now I must dig deep, complete the tasks at hand, and look for those tiny sparks that might give way to a new rush of excitment in my life.

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