OK, I don't know why but I want to write this... -- I know it's the holidays and all but something happened yesterday that took me aback and is still with me today.
I went to the pool hall to try out my new eye and it worked wonderfully. In fact, what I noticed most of all wasn't how clearly I could see the balls but rather how clearly I could see the pockets. (There is stitching along the bottom of Diamond pocket liners -- who knew!) I was a about to leave and then said to myself: shoot off one more rack. So I did and then I packed up my stuff and left. Then I swung by the CVS next door to the pool hall to pick up some tape for my plastic eye patch that I have to wear at night and headed to the highway.
Because I was leaving the CVS parking lot, I was going a different way that I normally would. I crossed the street and stopped under the highway overpass. Everyone was stopped.
Moments before there had been an accident at the intersection at the far side of the highway overpass where I would have taken a left to get on St Peter's Parkway. A car, with its hood crushed, was in the middle of the intersection, as was a white SUV flipped on its roof. And on the curb of the road, where some other drivers had gotten out of their cars to help, there was a woman screaming. You know, nowadays, we all see and hear actors screaming on TV and in the movies. But these were the screams I doubt most of us have ever heard in real life. They were the screams of someone who had just lost someone they loved. These were screams that sunk down deep to the bottom, the core of my soul.
I could tell there was nothing I could do and in the distance I heard the sirens of the police and ambulances and I made a U-turn and wormed my way around the roads to get home via a different path. But I left with a dissonance in my heart that said: if not for that extra rack maybe that could have been me on Christmas Eve.
Soooo, I write this to say: count your blessings this holiday. Be happy in the warmth of your friendships and the love of your family and don't get caught up in the small stuff.
Lou Figueroa
I went to the pool hall to try out my new eye and it worked wonderfully. In fact, what I noticed most of all wasn't how clearly I could see the balls but rather how clearly I could see the pockets. (There is stitching along the bottom of Diamond pocket liners -- who knew!) I was a about to leave and then said to myself: shoot off one more rack. So I did and then I packed up my stuff and left. Then I swung by the CVS next door to the pool hall to pick up some tape for my plastic eye patch that I have to wear at night and headed to the highway.
Because I was leaving the CVS parking lot, I was going a different way that I normally would. I crossed the street and stopped under the highway overpass. Everyone was stopped.
Moments before there had been an accident at the intersection at the far side of the highway overpass where I would have taken a left to get on St Peter's Parkway. A car, with its hood crushed, was in the middle of the intersection, as was a white SUV flipped on its roof. And on the curb of the road, where some other drivers had gotten out of their cars to help, there was a woman screaming. You know, nowadays, we all see and hear actors screaming on TV and in the movies. But these were the screams I doubt most of us have ever heard in real life. They were the screams of someone who had just lost someone they loved. These were screams that sunk down deep to the bottom, the core of my soul.
I could tell there was nothing I could do and in the distance I heard the sirens of the police and ambulances and I made a U-turn and wormed my way around the roads to get home via a different path. But I left with a dissonance in my heart that said: if not for that extra rack maybe that could have been me on Christmas Eve.
Soooo, I write this to say: count your blessings this holiday. Be happy in the warmth of your friendships and the love of your family and don't get caught up in the small stuff.
Lou Figueroa
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