ONE LUCKEY FELLA'

ONE LUCKY FELLA' (written in Florida, last winter)


I was sitting and thinking about my life yesterday as we drifted in Sabastian Inlet. We were bottom fishing for flounder because the blues were not running yet. The incoming tide was really ''tame'' and we drifted slow, touching the bottom and waiting for the fish to get hungry. I sat there and kinda pondered my life and thought back over the years of work and travel, fun and tears, high points and the Black Low Point when I lost my first wife Linda. We were 43 years together and we laughed and loved and sometimes cried together. We explored life in a station wagon heading for Colorado and the Rockies and Utah where the earth has its skin scraped off and the bones are showing. We crossed this great country on a Goldwing motor cycle and tasted the rain and the wind and the sun on our faces and down in our boots some of the time. We took that same Goldwing and explored most of the eastern seaboard states and got a real 'taste' of travel and wanted more. We bought a motor home and went exploring after I retired in 95 and were firmly bitten by the RV bug. Life was good and we had the world on a string with great adventure thru our windshield. In 2000 Linda saw a coach with ''slides'' on it while we were in Dawson Creek on the way to Alaska. Guess what we bought when we got home from that trip. Yep, a 2000 Pace Arrow with two slides. On the last day of September, 03 My Linda woke up with a head ache and by 10:30 she was on the way to the hospital in an ambulance. Brain aneurism, nothing they could do. The doctors pronounced her brain dead on October 1 at about 8:37 am. My world caved in and I entered the Black Hole of nothingness. I walked the walls of our house that I had built in 2000. I stopped taking my heart meds and re-lit a ''ciggie'' and sat the bottle of Jack on the table and lost count of the days and nites. I slept on the sofa and used the guest bathroom when I decided to take a shower. I walked the walls like a caged tiger and cursed God for taking My Linda. Life meant nothing, nothing meant nothing. My closest friends became a bottle of Jack and a 357 Smith with hollow points. I tasted gun oil several times and backed away. Sometimes I lived life a few minutes at a times. I would watch the sunset from our deck and curse God and challenge him for taking away my life. I lost my faith and didn't care. Life was nothing. Money was nothing. Nothing was nothing and I had no purpose in life save to take a breath for no reason that I could see. I ''Zombied'' along from day to day, bouncing off the walls without purpose. I changed my will and would have made a few people kinda wealthy if I would have punched out. I gave some things away to people that I thought loved me and were truly my friends. I gave away some gold and money and most of all I gave away my trust to people that swore they loved me. I made the error of giving them a copy of my will so they would come to the funeral and to the ''reading''........ Big Error.....Really Big Error on my part. Everyone knew that Linda and I had no children, and I had no brother no sister no mother no father and now ….. No Wife.... I had ''money'' but it meant nothing to me.
I would go to Walmart and take a buggy and just walk. Not looking, Not shopping, just walking among people so I would not ''punch out'' that day. Maybe tomorrow or maybe tonight when I get home, but not today in the Walmart.
One day I saw Willa shopping in Walmart. Pretty girl. Big brown eyes, pretty smile. She was pushing a buggy and for the first time in a long time I smiled and she smiled back. WOOOOOOOHOOOO... I smiled again and she smiled again and I looked around to see if she was really smiling at me and she was. We had coffee in the coffee shop and talked for two hours and I started to come back to life very slowly. She was a nurse and she thought I was a maintenance man in a furniture factory because I kept babbling about fixing the saws.
We went very slow. We would meet at Wally World and just talk and drink really bad coffee. I started becoming human again and Mr. Jack D. got sat back in the cub board and Mr. Smith & W. got put back in the gun cabinet and I started to live again. I will not bore you with the rest of the story because I am sure I have posted it before now but I will say this.
When you are your lowest in life and life means nothing to you and life has nothing to offer............... LOOK AROUND AND SMILE AT SOMEONE.... It may just change your life back to the good..........


Nuff said for now.


God bless our vets … ALL GAVE SOME.... SOME GAVE ALL...


I will post again when I find something worth writing about ….me....


ps. Note to MY Willa. You are my love and my life and without you, I would not be here now.