Friday Morning Musings

I am a reader.

Sitting on the stoop, book in hand, my mind wanders from the dark words written on the creamy white worn library book pages.

My life reflects a different reality than the one I am reading about. My reality is full of the sunshine beaming down onto my body, creating a lull of peace and tranquility. Whereas the words on the page, tells of brutality to all ages, and to anyone who gets in the way of a dictator and his brainless peons.

I truly marvel at days like today, where there is a symphony of nature’s music ringing in my ears— the hidden sounds of life rustling through the leaves, the dirt and the tree bark. I am such an involved reader that even though these sounds are swirling around me, my mind is actually living in the cacophony of machine guns and yelling guttural anger at innocent people who did nothing except be born with the “wrong” blood flowing through their bodies.

My blood flows of that “wrong” blood and yet, just like my astrological sign of the Gemini there is another genetic link that also flows in my blood that was considered, the “elite” properties. The looks that spared your life, the highly coveted proper nose, blond hair and look of what Hitler considered correct. Did it even hit anyone as strange that HE didn’t even have that “look”?

Books do this to me.  I live too deeply in them. I start dwelling on what would it have been like for me had my father also grown up in Germany and not the States where my Grandparents met after leaving Germany. Or, if I had been born at that time and not years later would the Jewish blood still have been detected even though I was a blond haired, brown eyed, button-nosed tike like my mother was?

The endless questions of how people did not see what was going on, twist around in my brain. Was it safer for them to just turn a blinds eye on the situation and save their own families?  What would I have done; would I have helped like so many in the book I am reading, or shut down my heart to those who were suffering?  I don’t think that is something anyone can answer without going through it. These are the days I wish my Grandma was alive to ask her…

 

I am an adventurer.

 

Some people, want to push their bodies to the limits, (like my husband). They are moving in a constant state of flux while repelling off mountains, skiing black diamond slopes, sky diving, flying airplanes and jumping off of bridges hooked to only a ginormous, thicker version of a rubber band.  

I, on the other hand, live those adventures in the sanctity of a bound world. I am happy as a clam sitting under a tree, on a bench in the park, a beach chair in the sand, or even on the floor of my room with a book sitting in my lap taking me to wherever I want to go.

Then the Gemini kicks in and I need people. I need to speak with others about the depth that we call life. I need to laugh, I need to cry, to hug those I see struggling in their own little worlds. I need to hear children playing happily in their yards and dreaming up adventures from their imaginations. Most book adventurists don’t need to socialize beyond their own realm of influence. I thrive off of meeting new people. It is not painful for me. I am not an introvert, but an extrovert.

Does that mean that I am like Jay Gatsby trying to create a different reality from the one I truly enjoy? Or, is it the opposite— Do I truly enjoy being social, except, I am too afraid to go out for the adventure so the safe thing to do is experience it through books and I am pretending to love being by myself? 

There might be a truth to both sides. I mean, I don’t know of any other social-loving people that carries a book with them in their purse, no matter the occasion, whether it is a cocktail party, or a hayride picking out pumpkins. 

Such a duel life I live.