Ghost Story

Mike and Ellen were a married couple who were regulars at the store and also went to my church. Both pretty quiet, but always nice to everyone they stopped to talk to. Both were about sixty, Ellen an average size woman and Mike a gentle giant of a guy. They almost always came in to shop together and seemed very devoted to each other. Three weeks ago Ellen died suddenly of a heart attack. Last week, on Sunday, I saw Mike going down an aisle of the store and I wanted to express my condolences so I started down the next aisle to meet him when he came down that one. When I got to the end and turned the corner he was gone, so I figured to catch him next time he was in. The next day I opened the paper and there was Mike's picture in the obituaries. He had died on Saturday, almost two weeks after his wife and a day before I saw him in the store. I thought that maybe I had been seeing things the day before, although I was certain it was him in the store. I didn't tell anyone about it, but a few days later, this last Thursday, I saw him again, turning into an aisle down by the water machine. I hurried to where I saw him, not knowing what I'd do when I saw him up close. He was gone when I got there and I walked up and down each aisle to see if there was someone who looked just like him, but there wasn't. He was someone you couldn't easily mistake for anyone else. At lunch that day I was talking to Jody the office girl and happened to mention how sad it was that Mike and Ellen had passed so close together. She got very quiet as soon as I said that. Then I told her, with a slight chuckle, that I thought I saw Mike in the store and I must be losing my marbles. Her eyes got big and her face turned pale. "I saw him in here too! It was last Sunday, the day after he died!". We just looked at each other for awhile, not knowing what to say.
Who knows, maybe he was coming back to get a few things before departing for good.

Suicide is Painless

A while back my store manager was talking about someone he knew who had just killed himself after a lot of personal problems. He made the remark; "I don't see how anyone could get that desperate that they could even think about killing himself". I didn't say anything, as it was pretty much a rhetorical statement, but I felt myself qualified enough to give an answer because, unlike him, I had been to some pretty low places and had thoughts that turned toward bringing an end to my existence. He had never been in the middle of a full-blown panic attack where the mind goes off on a tangent of irrational thinking and chaotic thoughts that come out of nowhere. Where every muscle in your body feels like it's trying to jump up and run away, and your stomach feels like a pit of acid eating through your midsection. He'd never felt the anger and frustration that comes immediately after a panic attack because he was powerless to stop it. Or the embarrassment of having to change plans and trying to explain why without revealing the true reason. Or the disappointment in his kids' eyes and the hurt in his heart when he knows he let them down, again. Or the humiliation and shame when his wife reaches the end of her patience and screams "Why can't you just get over it!". Or gets so depressed that he can't even visualize a life that isn't like this all the time..... Yeah, I can see where some people might take extreme measures when problems become overwhelming. Sometimes suicide doesn't seem so awful.

Look What I Found

Today was only the second time I've walked up the hill and down to the other side of the land we bought this summer. The first time I only went to the one end of the property, which ended in woods as far as I could see. Today I walked down to the other end and the property line ended at a fenceline with this spectacular view lying beyond. I wish I could have gotten the whole vista into the shot because this pic doesn't really capture all I could see.

In other news, the police managed to catch the vandals that busted the mirror on my car, and on fifty other cars in this town and thirty more in the adjoining town. Four, possibly five teenagers on a night of fun that started with throwing corn and ended with a mirror smashing run. I don't know if they'll have to make restitution, but it's got to add up to a lot of money. Only the glass in my mirror was broken but there were a lot of people with a lot worse damage.

The Nudder Blankee

When my youngest son Ryan was born, our neighbor (not from the redneck-magnet rental but the house on the other side of us) gave us two blankets that she'd made as a baby gift. They were almost identical except slightly different in color. As Ryan got older he developed a preference for one of them over the other. When he started talking he started calling it his "nudder blankee" because when we would cover him with the one he didn't like he would say that he wanted the nudder (other) one. He became so attached to that one that the other one was never wanted. One night when he was sleeping, in his pitch-black room, I covered him with the one that he didn't like. Even though it was impossible to tell the difference in the dark, he woke up and came running out into the hallway and said "This is not my nudder blankee!".

My wife had a pile of clothes and things in the dining room to take to the Goodwill the other day, and with it being cold in the house I grabbed a blanket off the top of the pile to cover up with. When Ryan, now eleven, came in the room he said "Hey that's my nudder blankee!". It was indeed, and had been scheduled for dispersal to some needy person until Ryan found that out and rescued it by saying that we couldn't give his nudder blankee away. So, after being buried in a stack of baby things for a few years it has returned and is being used by him even at this moment. The simple comforts of life.

Vandalism

I went out to get into my car yesterday and found the inside of my side mirror laying on the road slightly under the car. I picked pieces of glass out of the road and took them inside to throw away. When I came back out a police car was parked on the street talking to my neighbor across the road. I stopped him when he got through talking to them and told him my mirror was broken. He said "Yeah, you and fifty other people." Apparently someone went on a spree and smashed mirrors on about 80 vehicles in the area. Oh well, just another day in a small town.

Bad Teacher

When my oldest son started school in kindergarten my wife and I were feeling the same emotions that, I'm sure, most parents feel at this time. At five years old he was quite a handsome lad and, although he was quiet around other people, he was pretty witty and intelligent for a five year old. So we sent him off that first day to start his education, knowing he was going to do great. We hadn't had the money to send him to pre-school so he hadn't been exposed to a room full of kids quite like a classroom setting, but we weren't worried. We knew he would adjust soon enough. The second day of school - the second day- I got a call from the school principal wanting to meet with me. I thought "gosh he's in trouble already!?". When I went to the school (my wife was working that day) I met with his teacher and the principal. The teacher wasted no time expressing herself. "Your son isn't participating in classroom activities like he should. He just sits there and doesn't talk". I told her that he was quiet by nature and hadn't been around kids like that. "Well I can't take the time to try to bring him out of his shell." She said. "I have a whole classroom and a schedule to keep, I cannot stop everything for him!" The class consisted of eleven kids total. And she couldn't take time out to help one.The principal offered "we'll let him go at his own pace for a little while and see how it goes." Me, being a parent for a mere five years figured a teacher of twenty years surely knew what she was doing. As the year went on it was apparent that my son was falling farther and farther behind, and that the teacher had intentionally left him and one or two others like him to catch up on their own. This didn't become obvious to my wife and me until the school sent home a video to all the parents showing an activity that they were working on. In it all the kids were at the front of the classroom actively participating while my son and another boy sat at the back of the room watching. That was when the anger hit me. Not only was he being cheated out of his education, but by keeping him separated from his classmates like that the other kids developed a view of him, and the other one or two kids, as outsiders. Not a good way for a shy kid to build a camaraderie with his classmates. I had another meeting with the principal who assured me that once in first grade things would be different. Evidently he knew what the teacher was doing but lacked the courage to intervene. Being more trusting than smart I went along with things for the whole kindergarten year, eager for first grade to start and bring a fresh change.
When first grade came things were actually a little better with a new teacher, but the seeds of eager learning that never got nurtured in kindergarten were slow to grow in first grade, and he was behind in all subjects, not to mention being looked at as different, slow, stupid and all other adjectives kids come up with to describe someone who's not an active part of the class. From then until he graduated high school he had trouble learning. He was 'diagnosed' with a learning disability then ADD and put on Ritalin for a time, put in Special Ed. classes,but nothing helped him to reach the level of learning where the rest of his class was, and he graduated high school with less than the normal amount of accumulated knowledge that a graduate has. He is struggling to make adjustments to adult life without proper reading and writing skills, but the inner intelligence that he possessed all along shows through more and more now and he is handling things quite well, considering the start he got in school.

I write this now because I saw his kindergarten teacher today. She looks just as cold and heartless as she always has, and I doubt she has any remorse for failing to reach the students who needed her the most. A few years after we took the kids out of that school ( a Catholic school) and put them in public school that teacher was fired for slapping one of her students. We also from a lot of parents who had experiences with her similar to ours. Even though she was only my son's teacher for one year I can't help but blame her, at least partly, for him not adjusting well to school. I hope one day I'll see things differently because nothing good ever comes of harboring hateful feelings.

The Donut Shop

When I was sixteen I had a job working for my brother-in-law. He and my sister owned a cleaning company which did any kind of cleaning from factory janitorial jobs to washing windows for little old ladies. My BIL did all the work, my sister kept the books and I helped out along with one or two other guys he hired. Actually there were quite a few guys that worked for him but they never stayed longer than a couple of paychecks. I had made a decision to quit the baseball team (I could have stayed and warmed the bench the rest of the year) and start making some real money working everyday. Although the $2/hour doesn't seem like much now, back then it... wasn't really much either, but it was money I wouldn't have otherwise. A couple of years down the road when I was out of school I was still working for my BIL, and since I was out of school I could now work all hours of the day. There were quite a few places that got their windows cleaned on a regular basis, and one of these was Mister Donut. It was once a week, or once a month maybe, that we cleaned the windows there but we were there every night, sometimes a couple of times a night. My brother-in-law had the "gift of gab" and could sit for hours talking to the waitress, the owner or just people sitting around the horseshoe-shaped counter. It was one of my favorite places to go because of a combination of several things; cute waitresses, great donuts and lots and lots of interesting people. A lot of times we were there in the wee hours of the morning, at which time the greatest variety of people walked in. There were always cops sitting there at night. No joke. As soon as one squad car would leave another would take their break five minutes later. Every once in awhile you'd overhear them talking about something that happened, and pick up a bit of information that didn't make it to the newspapers. Maybe gruesome details of a car wreck or a stabbing that no one else knew. It was kind of funny too, because when the bars closed at two the drunks would roll in to get some coffee to sober up. The donut shop was like neutral ground because the cops never bothered any of the drunks trying to sober up, and the drunks never caused any trouble with the police sitting across the way from them.
One of the waitresses was about a year or so younger than me and very cute. I left her lots of tips until I found out she was the girlfriend of the kid who worked in back. That made me sad. Another waitress was an older woman... maybe ten years older than me who was kind of cute and really nice. I didn't pay her as much attention but later my BIL told me that she said whenever I looked at her she would quiver all over because I had such penetrating eyes. Wish I'd have known that a little earlier, but I found out too late and missed any chance with her too. That was my luck back then. No luck.
There were lots of regulars who showed up through the day and night. Some who would talk to you and others you just nodded at in recognition as you sat down. I remember in particular two of them. Bob and Grandpa. They were always together so I suppose they worked together like my BIL and I did. Bob was a guy about forty five or fifty and Grandpa was about sixty or sixty five. Bob fancied himself a comedian and was always trying to say something funny. He was never funny, but Grandpa - who never said a word- always guffawed like it was the funniest thing he'd ever heard.
I went back to Mister Donut after I quit working for my BIL, but since I now had a day job it just wasn't the same as being in there late at night. The owners got a divorce not long after I started my day job and it closed down before the building was reopened several times as different businesses. It's now a cell phone store I believe. I really miss going there, even after all these years. It was my hangout, much like the skating rink would become in a couple of years down the road. Part of my past that I file under "Remember when...".

Maid Needed

This house is in it's usual messy condition. How did it get so hard to stay on top of the housework? Mainly by means of one eleven year old boy who can single-handedly wreck this place in the blink of an eye. Throw in a couple of brothers who aren't much neater and a mom and dad who don't get many days off to clean and that adds up to the cluttered pigsty I call home. Right now it's unfair to throw any blame on his oldest brother, as he's in Buffalo making tons of money cleaning up after the snow storm up there. Even so, there is a desperate need for a maid who can decipher between junk mail and important mail, is willing to wade through mountains of dirty socks and underwear, and knows how to get spots out of carpets.... and comes cheap. We've thought seriously about it, mainly to shame the boys into keeping things cleaned up, but I'm sure they'd think it was cool that we had a maid and wouldn't change a thing in the way of helping out.
My wife and I both spent the last couple of days getting dishes and laundry done, floors clean and trash picked up. As I sit here I look into the kitchen and see that the countertop has dirty dishes sitting on it, peanut butter, bread and crackers are sitting on the table and here in the dining room there's a towel on the floor and a pair of underwear(clean? dirty? who knows) on the dining table...beside the cat. I'm sure everyone reading this is thinking "Boy I'd sure love to visit Tim right now". Come on over. I'll just have the maid tidy up a bit.

Neighbors...Again

How many times have I come on here and written about my neighbors? A lot. The scene I just witnessed prompts me to do so again, mainly because there's nothing else happening to write about. I came home an hour ago, having to park in back of the house because there was no place on the street to park, and something was going on next door. A lot of people were standing outside (obviously the owners of the cars) arguing and yelling loudly with the neighbors over... who knows what. Drugs would be my first eight choices. Two black men were threatening the occupants of the house, telling them they were going to come back and "kill all you mother f*****s". There aren't that many black people in this area, and I know most of them, so when two unfamiliar black men show up at the house next door(which is where a drug bust took place three weeks ago) yelling that they're going to kill people I just assume that it's got to do with drugs.
Last Sunday night I was kept awake by a banging noise from outside in front of that house until about 2 A.M. The next morning I saw the realtor's For Sale sign laying in pieces on the sidewalk, evidently being the target of a few bricks on that particular early morning. They always knock the sign down shortly after the realtor comes and puts it back up. They obviously don't want someone to come along and buy the house and throw them out. I wish I had the money to buy it. I'd tear it down and maybe have some peace for a change.

For Want of a Nail...The Kingdom Was Lost

Sometimes you can look back at your life and see that one instant which changed the course of your life, for better or worse. More than likely it was a decision that you made which was the impetus for this change. In my own life I can see the results of decisions that I made which, at the time, seemed minor in importance but proved to be the start of behavioral changes or certain ways of thinking. Sometimes the choices I made kept me on the straight and narrow path while others created downfalls that would last most of my life.

I can remember a couple of key moments in my life, challenges really, which, looking back, I can say I was proud of the way I met them. Little, insignificant things at the time perhaps. Like the time in high school when a lot of the 'macho' guys were talking about all the shoplifting they did and the stuff they had heisted. I wanted to be as macho and cool so into the big department store I went, wandering through the aisles with a large winter coat on with deep pockets. I picked up a pack of inflating needles for my basketball and stuck them in my pocket. The only way out of the store was to go through a checkout line so I waited, intending to just walk through like I decided not to get anything. I had my hand in my pockets and right up to the register I went. At the last second I made my decision. It looked so easy to just keep walking through, but instead I pulled the pack out of my coat and paid for it. No big deal, maybe my friends would have called me 'chicken' had I told them, but I knew as I walked out the store that I did the right thing because, sure enough, I would have tried it again had I made it out the store or felt guilty about it for a long time. Later, when I worked in one of those department stores, I found out that I was probably under surveillance from the minute I walked in. Another time I had a choice to make was when I was offered a joint from one of my friends. I declined. Again, not a big deal, but being brought up in a strict Catholic family I realized(afterward) that I would be turning my back on the values my parents tried to instill in me. Reading a lot of the blogs on here I know that, as someone who's never smoked a joint, I'm probably in the minority, but I think doing something I knew was right is something I can look back on and use as an example to my kids that you don't have to give in to peer pressure.

Of course there were many more moments that I'd rather go back and change. A lot of those came from me sticking my foot in my mouth. I used to be very shy, so once in awhile I'd make a joke around people who didn't know me very well and ended up having them form the wrong opinion of me. That is something that's hard to mend, someone's impression of you. Then when it came to parenting... Wow, so much that I did wrong, especially with my first son. We got no instruction manual with him, yet when we left the hospital I assumed that since I was from a large, loving family that everything would fall into place and there would be no complications, no major decisions that I didn't already foresee. Little did I know that so many of the things I did, or didn't do, would aid in denying him to become the intelligent young man he started out to be. Although I am so proud of him as the grownup he's become and the moral values he lives by, he is someone who graduated school almost illiterate because of the fact that I had more faith in the school system than I should have had, and didn't spend enough time teaching him at home. Although I've tried to change things when it came to my other two sons I still wonder what as yet unseen consequences will emerge of the things I've done or haven't done.

The "It's Alive" Baby Is Back...Only Now There Are Three Of Them

As Halloween approaches I eagerly await the horror show explosion that almost every channel has this time of year. I get disappointed that I never have enough time to sit and watch more of them. Before the introduction of VCRs and cable available everywhere you would either have to go to the theater to see the movies or wait several years before it came out on tv (gosh Tim must be OLD!).

Back then - before I was de-sensitized by all the horror movie watching I later did- some of the promos for the movies were enough to scare me into not wanting to take a chance at watching them. Living out in the boonies we had one security light on a pole that was halfway between the house and barn. That was the only light for more than a mile around, so it got very dark and very very scary living there, especially if you'd just gotten through watching a horror movie because now you knew that there was something hiding under your bed, waiting until you got good and comfortable before dragging you away to some unforeseen doom. One of the movie ads that I remember and that scared me was for "It's Alive". It showed a crib while a lullaby played, then as the camera came closer a claw flopped over the side of the crib. I liked that movie a lot, though it was pretty much a 'B' movie with pretty poor special effects, but still...there could be a deformed monster baby that made its way into my neck of the woods, couldn't there? The commercial that scared me so bad that I didn't want to see the movie at all was "Phantasm". I can still hear those chilling words..."If this one doesn't scare you.. you're already dead".

Later on, when I got married and moved to the city, I discovered cable tv. I got to watch a lot of those terrifying movies and a whole lot more I hadn't heard of... in the daytime... in the city... surrounded by houses, people and lights. I got hooked on horror films. I found out that some of them weren't as scary as I had thought when I first saw them, and many were laughable. But with newer and better effects and different scare tactics the movie industry has managed to stay afloat in the horror category. Nowdays I can't wait until the terror-fest begins!

Plus Four More!!

Do you ever watch those commercials on tv for a singer, or group, that is past his prime and has put all his hits on a three disc set so you don't have to buy nine different cds to get all his big hits? Me either. But I used to when an ad for someone I liked came on. Anymore, instead of the thirty second commercial pushing the stuff, they opt for a five hour long infomercial at two in the morning, so there aren't as many as there used to be. At least not that I've seen lately. Did you ever notice, though, that they will have takes of the singer singing different songs while a list of thirty seven songs scrolls up the screen. And at the end it always says something like "Plus four more!"..... Huh? They just put this big long list on (half of them songs that someone else made popular) and they couldn't add the other four to it? It makes me wonder what the other ones were that they didn't see fit to show but added to the cd for your listening enjoyment. Not having researched this to any degree I can only imagine the quality of those songs.
1) Singer had a scrumptious dinner of Habernero Chili the night before the recording session and his bodily emissions were set to music.
2) Singer's ex shows up at studio and gets into bitch-fight with current wife. Sounds so much like one of his songs they give it a name and stick it on a cd.
3) Singer sings the national anthem, replacing the words he forgets with something that kinda rhymes.
4) Three minutes and sixteen seconds of dead silence titled "Thinking of You".

I know... another day of Tim's true thought patterns emerge onto the computer screen for all to see that he is not quite "all there".

Unable to Communicate

One of my friends from work just found out that her son has cancer. Her son is eighteen and I think they were all caught off guard by the news. Hopefully all will go well and the doctors will get him back to his old self in no time. My friend, understandably, was shocked and upset when she heard. I can only imagine how she must feel. For anyone to have to deal with something this major is very trying indeed, even more disheartening, I'm sure, because she and her son had just started to patch up their relationship which had been damaged because of her divorce and custody battles with her idiotic ex. I feel so helpless because I want to do something, even if it's just to be there to listen to her. I used to be. We were very close that way once, not that long ago, but something happened and things changed. Now we've become more like work acquaintances and most of our talk centers on the daily grind of the workplace instead of life outside the job. So I'm finding it difficult to know what to do or say. I only hope I can let her know-without putting my foot in my mouth- that I'm wishing her and her son well and I'm there if she needs anything.

I seem to have a tendency not to be able to handle those kinds of situations well. I've found that in an emergency that I can be solid as a rock, and if someone needs someone to listen to them I'm a very good listener, but when it comes to comforting someone I'm just not good at it at all. I really do care and want to help, it's just that I'm awkward in that way and I probably come off as cold and insensitive, although that's furthest from the truth.

Scorned As the One Who Ran

There is a fine line between cowardice and good sense, depending upon who is doing the judging. When we are younger our mannerisms are being molded by different stimuli around us, namely our peers and our parents. I think that parental actions, or non-actions, help to shape the people we become more than any other influential factor. However, some spur- of- the-moment decisions that youngsters make in certain situations will serve to cement , in their peers' minds, the type of person that youngster is, and may leave him stamped for a very long time with the label that his friends put on him. Here's an example of what I mean.

When I was in fifth grade there was a creek that ran through the playground at the end of the baseball field. Across the creek was a hill with a wooded area, then farther up the hill was an old house. The woods were off-limits, although I don't remember any of the teachers saying much if we went just across the creek and didn't go very deep into the woods. The house, however, was well beyond school property limits and everyone knew not to go that far. One day the two leaders, a.k.a. bullies, of the class decided to take a trip to that forbidden house and recruited all the boys in class to go with them except for myself and one other boy. They all went to the house, broke in and vandalized a lot of the property inside. The sheriff was called in and all the boys' parents were called and told what had happened and that their boys were in a heap of trouble. Since I had chosen not to participate I was branded a coward from that day on. It wasn't as if the kids came up to me and called me that, but in their ten year old minds an impression of me had been tattooed so that when they saw me they instinctively knew that I was no longer part of their group, and treated me differently. Even though I didn't realize it at the time, or even later, that incident would raise self-doubts in me that would take years to overcome, and may even be minutely responsible for my ongoing panic situations.

As a parent I've tried to encourage my kids to make the right decisions, not the ones that will make them popular. It's sometimes like walking a tightrope, to help them do the right thing and at the same time trying to nurture inner strength in them to avoid some of the pitfalls I've happened into. So far I think I've done a decent job, but my youngest son is reminding me a lot of myself at his age and I hope I have the resolve to help steer him toward a path of self-assurance and not being swayed by the taunts of others.

Wandering Mind

Most of the time that my body spends working my mind spends elsewhere, a lot of the time it has conversations with itself while a song plays in the background. There is always a song playing in my mind. Not necessarily one that I even like, which is something that bothers me... A song stuck in my head that I don't like. Anyway, today Subconscious Tim - or S.T.was having his usual conversation with Mute Tim ( there has to be someone for my mind to talk to or else people would think I was crazy) while a Bee Gee's song was playing. The subject of today's mind chat was music and movies. It went something like this:
S.T. "You know, Siskel and Ebert once went over their 'Guilty Pleasures', movies that either weren't hits or were ones that showcased a lot of T&A. What's my 'Guilty Pleasure' movie?"
M.T. silence
S.T. "I think one of them has to be Ice Castles. It's a chick movie and not one I'd go out and rent, but it always gets to me, especially the theme song. Lynne Holly Johnson was such a babe in that show and Robbie Benson played a tough guy hockey player, in contrast to most of his earlier movies that were pretty sappy and always seemed to have him paired with Glynnis O'Connor."
M.T. silence
S.T. "Remember Melissa Manchester's hair when she sang that song? It was really big and gorgeous. Hey, what was that movie that David Bowie was in... oh yeah, The Man Who Fell To Earth. What a disappointing thing that was. Supposed to be science fiction but more of a cure- for- insomnia movie. And then there was that other movie he was in, Goodbye Mr. Lawrence.
M.T. "Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence".
S.T. "Huh? Oh yeah, that's it. Now that wasn't a bad movie at all. Not like that turd of a movie he made before. I think I saw that Mr. Lawrence one when I was in the Air Force, stationed in Turkey."
M.T. " It was on The Movie Channel at the first apartment."
S.T. "Are you sure? I could have sworn I saw it over there".
M.T. "You were never in Turkey".
S.T. "Oh right, maybe it was at the apartment. Hey, listen! They changed the background music. Money For Nothing, that's a good song. I like the weird Al one almost as much as the original. You know, the song he did in his movie, UHF? That was a real underrated movie. Too bad more people never saw it."
M.T. "What do you mean 'more people never saw it'. That doesn't make sense."
S.T. "You know what I mean. Not a lot of people saw it and they should have."

Well, that was about a three minute stretch of my daily brain doodling. That goes on all day at work, covering a plethora of subjects from global economic troubles to the size of the hooters on that girl walking past. In fact, I solve most of the world's problems on a daily basis... in my mind.

A Day Without Sunshine is Like....Night

I really hate this time of year, if I haven't said that already. Sure, the changing colors on the trees make for beautiful hillsides and the grass doesn't need mowed quite as much as in the summer, but I always get a strange, lonely feeling when the season of Autumn approaches. I've found out in the last few years that I'm not the only one who gets like this. And... just as I'm about to write what the name of the symptom is it slips through the sieve that is my mind. Anyway, I guess a lot of people feel the same way as I do when the seasons change, some get a lot more depressed than I do and require medical treatment. I think it's the lack of daylight that contributes to the depression. I'm glad I don't get affected that badly, but I sympathize with those people because I can understand what they're going through.
If there is one thing that I do enjoy, from now until the snow flies, it's walking through the woods. The sounds, sights and smells are very different from any other time of the year. A lot fewer bugs flying around and most of the thick foliage has died off so it's easier to walk through, plus there is a stillness at this time of year that's almost eerie at times. As crazy as this sounds, I love being alone in the woods during the Fall season, even though the season makes me feel so lonely.