Honea Express

Archive for the ‘vacation’ Category

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I knew a man in the military. He was an Admiral. His name was Hills. He loved a good tune. You might say that Admiral Hills was alive with the sound of music. He loved art and he worked mostly in oils and Garfunkle. His presence was a thousand glasses toasted and his absence whispered in the sounds of silence. He rose above the world like a bridge over troubled water. Some people loved him like a rock.

I haven’t seen the man in over 40 years. I thought about sending him a message in a bottle — an SOS, but my bottles are full of ships and beer and sink heavy when empty. I’ve thought about taking a trip to wherever he lives — an ultimate vacation of old friends and their families. But where would I go? What would I do? What family members would I bring along?

I don’t know.

I could climb every mountain, search high and low. Would I find him in Belize, floating in a warm sea and sipping drinks made with exotic fruit and sweat-laced liquor? Would I search for him in Switzerland, skiing the Alps and being more or less neutral about all of it? They are so many silver white winters and so much melting into spring.

I could follow every highway, every path I know.

Any of these places would be perfect for a man and his wife, two boys and their dogs. Admiral Hills was a man of good cheer, and he always said that a family vacation is in the dreams and the plans, and the journey of maybe getting there. We should all pack accordingly.

We’ll get there someday.

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Don’t forget to enter the “Do What You Love” Sweepstakes, for a chance to win your own ultimate family vacation. I was selected for this sponsorship by the Clever Girls Collective, which endorses Blog With Integrity, as I do.

Inland was warmth and sunshine and days of summer stretching wearily. The coast, however, was 20 degrees cooler and worked in so many shades of gray.  The sky fell into the sea and the waves rolled across my cold feet before running up the stairs to take their place at the end of the line.  Clouds waited patiently.

The rocks in the ocean were the size of ships, and ships were the size of small birds flying off in the distance.  There was a cave on the beach and in it sat a family around a campfire.  Their dog ran free and happy, a green ball held tightly in its mouth.

She stopped in mid-sentence, her words lost beneath the beat of a tide rolling in.  I hadn’t been listening.  I was writing poems in my head as I am prone to do, and then promptly forgetting them as that requires much less effort than actually writing them down.  Most of them were rubbish, but one may have been damn near perfect.  I watched her watch the ground.  She was brilliant against the sepia shore.

She bent down and picked a drop of red out of the surf-trodden sand. It was a ladybug, caked in grains and left for dead.  Suddenly, the beach was alive with polka-dots in reds and yellows and the polka-dots were, in turn, covered in dots of their own.  We sat on our knees in the sand and dug ladybug after ladybug from their collective coastline grave.  Our shoes, which had long ago left our feet and become something meaningless to hold on to, became the soles of rebirth. It was on the bottom of my left flip-flop that one ladybug found breath and another was once again able to crawl.  It was somewhere opposite where my big toe would be that a ladybug shook the sand from its wings and flew away home.

It seems that they live in the trees that tremble from the side of steep ocean cliffs, and when certain winds blow the way that certain winds do, the ladybugs are pulled from whatever life they have known and dropped without warning over deep waters and hungry fish. Assuming they don’t drown, are not eaten or lost at sea, they are marooned on beaches not 50 feet from the trees on which they started.  But they are pounded with ebbs and flows, and they are forgotten amongst shells and bits of seaweed.  All in all, it’s no way to treat a lady.

And so we gathered those that we could and we carried them on flip-flops covered with newfound meaning to a piece of driftwood just below the tree line. The ladybugs wandered aimlessly and probably thought things about mortality and what to make of second chances.

Every so often one of us would say how much the boys would like this while the other would nod, skip a stone or stare out at the sea. They were on a different beach in a different state looking over the same nothingness and the endless everything. Our day was a glass half hollow, half lined with romance. We played the percentages.

Then we walked back across the beach, our shoes once again empty, our feet still cold and bare.  We passed big rocks, small ships, a family around a fire and a dog with a ball and the constant need to wag.   Our car was waiting for us, and beyond it a green forest and blue skies and something pretty on the radio.

We got sand everywhere.

Bear with me. I know I haven’t put up anything groundbreaking since, um, ever, and for that I apologize. In response to my bio post, the one with all of the handsome guys, I do write for a lot of blogs and the fact is that the list didn’t even include DadCentric or FameCrawler, mainly due to their not wanting to scare away readers by publishing a photo of me. It’s understandable.

I write 300 posts a month. No shit. I said it out loud. That felt good. I also oversee the writing of roughly 700 more posts by my collective team (about 25 bloggers) . It’s a living. That’s why I haven’t been writing anything of noticeable quality on this blog- I’m too busy writing noticeable quantity elsewhere.

It takes its toll. I don’t get a lot of sleep and my porn time is greatly compromised. The real victims here are you, my readers that I cherish, and my reads that I haven’t visited in weeks. It makes me feel like an ass. Shame on me.

Just know that it isn’t personal. I’m just freaking busy.

In the meantime, Sweetney published a private conversation that we had and now Al Gore is out to get me. Again.

Also, Matthew is hosting an auction for the YMCA and some of your favorite bloggers have donated items (bloggers much cooler than me with items much cooler than mine). I volunteered to paint your blog. Yes, yours. Basically, if you win the auction I’ll paint what your blog means to me. If you don’t have a blog you’re getting “Bloggers Playing Poker” (thanks, CIII).

And in closing (did I ever open anything?), I’m going to start including links, occasionally, at the bottom of my posts that go to stories nearing traffic bonuses. It’s tacky, sure, but damn, I need the money. I won’t do it often, and I won’t even acknowledge them after today. Click on them if you want, or don’t. I’ll still love you but I’ll just be all the hungrier doing it.

On that note, I’m going to Disneyland (again). My family needs some Daddy time and they like it with a slice of mouse. It’s like a vacation.
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NON-RELATED LINKS (a lot more than I’ll usually have, just a good month- hopefully, and some are the wife’s): Naomi Watts is Baby Crazy / Angelina Jolie Spends Time in Her PJ’s? / Jade Goody – Her Story / Jade Goody’s Wedding Photo / Nadya Suleman’s Sperm Donor – Tricked! / What’s Wrong With This Picture? -13 Year Old Alfie is a Father /First Pictures of Nadya Suleman’s Octuplets / Is Nadya Suleman in Hiding? /Jade Goody’s Wedding Dream is Coming True /Jade Goody in Her Wedding Dress – Photo