A Month is a Day in the Life of an African Violet

   The title up there has little to do with this entry, except that is shows how weird my thinking is at five thirty am after a rare whole night's sleep.

   I lie in bed, and I clap my light on with my new "clapper" audio light switch, and I look around my room, and I realize that it is my "world" now.  The Earth was once my world, but now my limitations have shrunk my territory.  My world is a wheel chair, in one  room, in an old folks institution, in a medium sized county, in a state within a country.  It stops there, I do not have a pass port like my daughter, son-in-law, and grandson. Well, it IS is the grandest state in the grandest country...that's pretty big, and my wheel chair world is pretty small.

Outside I have a car that I used to drive, and the family heirlooms and my household stuff is in a storage locker nearby. What a weird world, and what weird thoughts to reflect upon.

Once my world was wider.  I owned an airplane and the sky was mine, and I owned a boat which was on the Pacific Ocean, the largest of the oceans, and the wide world was mine.  I once lived in a condo with a deck and a dock.  I could go down to the edge of the dock and dip my fingers in the Pacific Ocean, and thereby be connected with water that had flowed the world over, touching all the continents, and through rivers to all the lands of the world.  I was touching water that had been ice in Antarctica and at the North Pole. I was touching water that has been in contact with Captain Cook, Amelia Earhart, the Santa Maria, and the Titanic.  I was everywhere.

   Did I say this entry was weird?  That doesn't tell the half of it. I was "under the weather" with a bellyache yesterday, and confined to my room for most of the day. I didn't even do a "virtual" mile or two on the stationary bike. My world was small...one room. And yet, there are folks herewhose world is smaller...they have to share a room.  Their world is HALF a room. 

   My world once was big.  When I was learning to fly, my first "cross country" flight was to San Diego and back from Los Angeles.  My instructor asked me on my return if I had any trouble navigating from San Diego to Los Angeles. 

  "No," I said, "I kept North America under my right wing and the Pacific Ocean under my left wing until I came to a huge city, and there I was."

   While boating in the fog one day I came upon a fisherman who said, "I'm lost."

   "No, you're not.  Go east until you come to California."  My world was once larger.

   By the way, navigating in the fog is an emotional experience.  Your world is about a hundred feet in diameter.  It is spooky.  The land is gone, you are alone. And you expected a freighter or speed boat to come charging into your world at any moment. I once impressed a lady passenger who was a day sailor herself, by navigating out into that scary fog-world, and then, using my watch and a compass, bringing us right back through the mist to the harbor entrance.  She was impressed, as was I. 

   That is enough rambling.  It is morning, and it will be daylight in half an hour.  My world will be expanding to take in the dining room for breakfast, and maybe even Starbucks for mid-morning coffee.

Tags: the world is my oyster.