Post #246

The kids are in Gulf Shores, Alabama for a week. Without me. There's a scene in the movie Jurassic World where two brothers are discussing their parents' brewing divorce. The younger brother is in tears, appropriately and deeply upset. His older brother tells him to look on the bright side; divorce means they'll get two of everything, two Christmases, two birthdays, etc. Michael saw Jurassic World with two buddies as one of his 'two birthdays.' The movie is right. M 'n' m get more trips and vacations, also. It's a lousy trade-off for divorce, obviously. For me to suggest there are benefits and concessions, a silver lining, is somewhere between absurd and ridiculous. But it's our reality, and we're livin'. We're livin' pretty well, in fact. Anyway, what I intended to express here is how I miss M 'n' m when they're gone for long periods, days and weeks, for too many axis-spins as we race through space to our deaths, around a very big, four-billion-year-old star that you could fit a million Earths inside of if it was an empty sphere. The sun is very bright – despite being 93 million miles away – but it's always less bright when M 'n' m are off on some adventure without their old man. Awww. And did you know the sun is only average-sized for a star? Seriously. Consider, for a moment, the enormousness of it all. And you are part of it. I hope melodramatic nerdiness is still in vogue. (The Big Bang Theory? I've never seen it but it rates in the stratosphere, and Grandma and Papa were starstruck when they shared a restaurant with one of the show's actors recently in Manhattan.) My longest without M 'n' m is three weeks in China for work. I began to feel like I was 93 million miles away. I can’t imagine what it’s like to be a soldier on deployment with babies, toddlers, or kids back home. Going weeks without holding and kissing M 'n' m is a little like being carsick; it creeps up and wet-blankets you with a shitty feeling in your gut and your skull, and it only goes away when the ride stops. The ride stops tomorrow for me. M 'n' m fly home.