Ice will be on one of his famous out of town business trips all this week so my participation in blogging may be diminished somewhat.  Meanwhile, yall have a good week and I'll leave you with a partial rambling disertion that has come to light with a new discovery in the former Northwest Territory just last month.

ice

Almost midnight and still snowing I think to myself, as I peer out the small bay window next to the desk.  It’s late for me to be up, but I wanted to watch the snow and it's gentle fall, and although the fire in the hearth is dying, its warmth feels good to me.  I can faintly hear familiar music coming from the other study, which is adjacent to the one I’m in.  Probably Elvis, which is a favorite of my granddaughter, Lucy, who doubles as my official guardian.  She’s also up, hardly ever going to bed till early morning, and without doubt still ‘blogging,' using Blogstreamer a fourth generation version of Blogstream, the ancient blogging tool I utilized back around the turn of the century. 

Watching the snow, and listening to the music, my mind drifts easily back in time, to 1971, over seventy years ago.  It’s June and I’ve been out of Nam, and the Army for less than a year; just bumming around the country has brought me to Corpus, mainly because the nights are warm this time of the year, which is especially nice if you’re sleeping outside most nights as I am.

During the course of my bumming around  – money has not been plentiful, thus I’ve had to become accomplished at the many ways to raise money, one of which is selling blood, mine.  There was always some agency offering to buy blood, you just had to find it.  Which is what I was looking for that day when I came across an ad of another sort.  At first glance it was my intention to not answer its summons; as it was worded in a peculiar fashion, and seemed surreal, plus it was offering a substantial sum of money, which notched it up a little on my suspicion meter.  

I did, however, answer the ad that day, and even though I was near broke at the time, I’ve always told myself that it wasn’t the money that made me make the call; whatever the reason, the fact was - I needed money, and it was offering some. The ad was seeking people with an exceptional memory to participate in a study being run by some group somewhere.  For some reason, I’d always had the ability to recall huge blocks of my past life, without effort, quoting conversations, verbatim, that I’d had with my parents, other relatives and friends, months in the past, even years.  I remember the look of astonishment that Dr. White, our family Doctor, had given me one morning, when I’d repeated to him word for word - a conversation we’d had five years earlier, when I’d first been brought to him as an 8 year old.  It was at this juncture of my life that I began to keep this unique ability from the adult world, for within a few days, I had the Doc and some of his other Doctor type friends, all over me and my parents, to ‘bring me in for some kind of special check-up.’

I never had that ‘special check-up,’ keeping my talent pretty much undercover after that, even while in High School, and later while in the Army.  For a short time after getting out of the Army, I’d tried to use it to my advantage, my financial advantage especially, but could never get anywhere with it.  Seems that nobody was much impressed with it, and since it couldn’t help me, it just remained a curious by-product of myself that was only mildly interesting to anyone.  That is until I saw the ad in the Corpus newspaper.  Oddly enough, right around that time – we’d been hearing street rumors that the government was looking into mind-expanding drugs, there was even hints that they were experimenting with soldiers and LSD. 

So, it was under these circumstances that I read the ad and instantly discounted it.  However, the lure of easy money quickly overcame my uneasy feelings, and  misgivings aside, I made the call.  I remember thinking as I dialed the number, about a saying I’d heard sometime before, about not being able to ‘un-ring the bell once it’s been rung,’ which seemed to be an odd thing to be thinking about at the time, although today as I write this, I can see it was just a harbinger of things to come.