The Diary of Queen Mothy |
A Continuation of My Tale of the Wild Blue Yonder and Some Poignant Moments Following written @ 4:55 PM on February 18, 2002 Mom came home a few minutes later. She was limping and pissed off because she didn't meet us for lunch. She informed me that she had fallen looking for us and possibly broken her ankle. Oh, great, I thought. "On top of that," she declared, "I think I blew out my knee doing yoga this morning." My mother is also not the skiing type. I guess I know where I got that from. I'm not sure what I did for the rest of that afternoon, but I can assure you that it's not really worth mentioning. Dad and the boys came home sometime around 5 and proceeded to make fun of Mom for being the only person in the party who received a ski injury from not skiing. I took her to the First Aid place on the mountain to get her a wrap for her leg, but they didn't have any there because "we don't suggest you wrap her leg." Of course not. They would rather charge you an immediate $250 deposit for service. So we have to climb three floors and buy one over-the-counter. And then we went to a general store to pick up some milk. $3.50 for half a gallon of milk! How in the hell can they get away with charging you that just because you're 4,680 feet above sea level?! Well, by that time, it was sunset on the mountain, and that was beautiful too. Mom and I saw some deer off to the side of road walking along like they were domestic dogs in the throng of noisy traffic. It was quite surreal. The family went out for dinner at a place called The Junction. It was, like, a two hour wait, but the food was good and the restaurant was in an antique train style motif. It was nice, and I thought the waiter, named Corrie, who plays professional baseball in Albany, was rather good-looking, as that annoying bastard from down the street informed him with a victorious grin. How embarassing was that. The day ended with a losing game of Uno and some speed skating events on the Olympics. ~~~ The next morning, I rose late. I informed Dad that I would not be joining him for a sport that kills, and Mother and I limped out into the freezing cold in search for something to do. They really ought to have other things on that mountain besides skiing. The solution to any girl's problem? Shop, of course! Problem was there wasn't many stores to choose from, as they were all sporty-hurray-for-the-death-sport and overpriced. So Mom and I got some coffee and chai and went back to the condo to watch some movies. I recommend anyone interested in some high quality films to rent "Chocolat." It was a wonderful movie, and each Oscar it won was well-deserved. It's one of my personal favorites now. I won't forget it anytime soon. The second movie was "Pollock," the artist from the 1940s that dripped his paint all over canvas and won acclaim. What a pyscho. But still a very good movie. And when he went through his psychotic episodes, I could almost understand where he was coming from-- that was the scary/funny part of the whole thing. Went out to eat after the boys came home. Jonathan informed us that some guys were taking pictures of him and Andy doing tricks in their skiis. Pshaw! Good for them. *rolling eyes* Then we came back and watched a movie called "The Score," with Robert DeNiro. Not bad. It's one of those movies that vaguely reminds you of "The Godfather." Definitely a guy movie, but still good. ~~~ We had to get up early this Monday morning to leave, and I rose to see a beautiful sunrise on the mountains. It was nice after the blizzard yesterday. It was beautiful. Amazing how red pollution can make the sun look, but still nice. I left with a new respect for anyone who makes a living or lives up in the mountains. Not exactly like life in the suburbs of Cincinnati; there really is some sacrifice involved. It's almost as if the mountains say, "Respect and be respected." The morning was quite moving, and the snow on the bare trees and pines glistened in the morning light. Beautiful, there really was no other word for it. It was something you had to see for yourself. Sun-kissed mountain slopes. Life stirred underneath the white blanket and the jagged cliff sides. I didn't get carsick this time. And I saw what I had missed in the dark on my way down: life. Living farms that housed the small creatures were bustling, and the cows sprinkled with melted snow drops shined in the hazy sun on the pastures. It really made me think. This is America. And the politics and the CNN updates on the clean-up progress of the World Trade Center disasters seemed so far away. "So much life in its meshes. . ." Zora Neale Hurston I thought about my novels on the way back and how I must somehow find a way to incorporate this feeling of life into my fledgling societies I created. I thought about a lot of things. It was a time of putting my life in perspective. The next two weeks are going to be hell with all the work I have to catch up on, with the mock trial competition that I'm far from ready for, and the musical in two weeks. And yet strangely I'm not worried. I feel almost better. The problems that I have seem to be woven into the quilt that is my life. The pattern and the sewing is not done. I saw the gold-domed capital building of West Virginia. It was just as I had imagined out of the book "Missing May." Gold and shining in the morning light, and I could almost feel the old man's sense of expectation. And then I saw a billboard on the highway before an exit that read "Coal Keeps the Lights On." And then cramped in between the mountains and the freeway was a coal-mining town, a depressed aspect of civilization that stretched on for miles and crammed against this huge factory, as if the factory were a great castle, and the townspeople were the under lords and the serfs that had to tend to it. The town was like a great platform built from Plasticville town houses and type G Lionel train sets situated in God's basement. It was captivating, and I don't know why. This town depended on this great castle for protection and survival, a tiny hint of feudalism in a capitalistic society. The freeway wound with the town along a tiny river. The buildings and the walls that made them up sang of a time when they were all new, when activity bustled madly and one could almost hear the sounds of whistles from the factory, and the churning of locomotives. If those walls and ancient streets could speak, would they tell of a time when they were so important that if was up to them to drive a war and turn a baby country into a superpower? Would they speak how their master built them up and then went off to work in that coal factory, and thereby sentenced his son and his son and his son and his son to work in the factory after that? How many lonely souls were there in those shady windows who longed to get out of that town? Did they see more to life than what was beyond their television sets? Yellowing American flags cut out from months-old papers that cried out America's recent tragedy curling in windows. Old toys rotting in damp yards. Shingles and awning hanging sharp over roofs and windows. Shutters with flaking paint. The mountains and the river beyond it all, seemingly timeless. The brick high school with a creaking bleachers that still whispered of a time when going to the moon was a miraculous work of science. What a world. I saw it all, and I saw nothing. Yes, my mind was clear. And while I cannot see through the darkness in my life, I know life. I will be sad when it comes my time to leave all this. And I wonder how can I see so much at 17 when my peers see so little? And now I'm home in isolated West Chester, a town that has seen nothing but prosperity even in times of depression. I will not live here forever, and now I'm not so sure I want to live in another like it. My work awaits me in the basement. I must finish what I've come to do. Such is life. I've seen it, and I've seen nothing. Suddenly I understand people. What a trip.
A Bit of History ~ And Onward! L'Amour Toujours! - August 08, 2005 |
Latest Entry | Archives | Diaryland |
Profile | Diaryrings | |
Guestbook | E-mail Me | Leave a note |
Art Work (Coming Soon) | Genealogy (Coming Soon) | The-Last-Unicorn.net |