Thought Pickings

I'm thinking about the way people treat each other. It's late in the evening and I suppose I'm feeling reflective about the day. I spent the evening driving home from Washington, about three hours in the car. I drove through all the weathers. I watched the sun go down. I saw glorious thunderheads in the sky. While on the interstate highway, I drove through some amazing landscapes. Sometimes even the East Coast megalopolis awes if you can look past the asphalt, concrete, and congestion.

Traffic was light. I passed between the holiday traffic gateways. 

And I'm back to people, in spite of trying to take myself away from them.

So today I was out with my mother. She's walking with a cane these days. We were rounding a corner in a hallway to get to an escalator in a mall in Georgetown. A couple of twenty-somethings were in a hurry and nearly knocked Mom down. They were not paying attention to where they were going and were practically running. I get being in a hurry, but you also have to have at least some situational awareness. The young woman laughed and said, "Sorry," as she continued her speedy careless progress. I said, "Please be careful. You nearly knocked my mother down." The young man looked at me as he walked by and said, "Relax." 

It was dismissive. 

And, for some reason, I can't get it off my mind.

This week has been filled with things that have made me stop and think. It's as if I am gathering things to ponder like pickings from my garden. I have a million things in process. I'm probably overestimating here, but I feel like the woman in the meme that shows her with 3000 tabs open, reflecting her state of mind. It feels strange to be back to my tiny apartment after spending the week at the family home. But I have hydrangea from my mother's garden in a vase on my kitchen table, so I know the time was real. 

In the car on the way home, between noticing the glorious sky and the steady stream of accidents by the side of the road, I was thinking how fun it would be if I lived a few blocks away from my mother and could drop in on her more often that every few months. That inevitably got me thinking about winning the lottery since she lives in one of the most expensive zip codes in a city of expensive zip codes. Once upon a time it was a nice, middle-class neighborhood, but property values have gone up and the homes are way beyond my ability to purchase there. That got me thinking about what all those people who are buying into that neighborhood do for a living. And back to winning the lottery. 

What would I do with all that money if I won?  

It's amazing how quickly the drive goes when you're thinking about what you could do with lottery winnings. 

The Great Summer Writing Retreat of 2019 continues. One hundred days of writing unedited ideas and following a prompt to its sometimes illogical conclusion.