Thar she blows...

Her Sweetness always told me while I was growing up that “a watched pot never boils.” The same could be true for volcanos… Right now we’re all waiting for Mt. St. Helens to erupt again and it has occurred to me that waiting for a volcano to blow is a lot like waiting for a baby’s birth. The wait goes on forever and the eventual explosion changes everything around you forevermore. Once the expulsion starts, there’s nothing you can do to stop it.

My baby (younger sonny) was thirty a little over a week ago. Wow, time flies when you’re having fun… Younger sonny is still a bit like an explosion. He’s energetic, can be abrupt at times and is always surprising me with his antics. He’ll stop by, usually for a refrigerator raid, rush into the house in a big hurry, under the tyranny of a severe time crunch, and then sooner than not, boom, he’s on his way out again.

Younger sonny is generally cheerful. I used to say he was “born with a smile and a song” although age and circumstances have honed that down some. After all, he’s stuck in retail hell and that could wipe the smile off anybody’s face at certain times. Younger and older sonnies are antipodal, like the ying and the yang. Older sonny is mostly quiescent and ruminative, but aquiver, like the mountain before the eruption. Although he does erupt from time to time too and then the lava, it doth flow. Beautiful daughter? She’s very far away, on the other side of this vast country, and presiding over her own little explosions, who just happen to be the world’s most adorable grandchildren. ~;^)

Her Sweetness, on the other hand, always explodes on the scene with the force akin to 1,000 megawatts. Considering her usual volatility, it’s like having a mini Mt. St. Helens right on the scene. She’s small but she’s volatile. When she enters the door it’s like having a dozen people enter at once. And then she launches this monologue about being terribly busy and she can’t possibly stay and…

I’ve come now to realize that she’s on her way out as she’s on her way in. Sigh… I’ve told her I recognize that she can’t stay but could she please refrain from saying it?! Psychologically, I fume, it’s a blow… "Now listen here," she says, “you just don’t understand…I have to bake hundreds of pies for orders and make tons of jams and jellies for orders and I have to have it all done yesterday and…” You get the picture. She doesn’t actually say hundreds and tons and yesterday but she pronounces what she has to do in a way that suggests those terms. She has always been this way and I suppose she always will be. Her Sweetness and I are often like a fuse and a butane lighter… But with Her Sweetness the wait for the eventual explosion is never long.

Waiting for a volcano to blow also reminds me of politics … The steam rising from Mt. St. Helens is like the steam from the pot boiling away in this ole gray noggin as I watch over the current political shenanigans and the nastiness and vituperation that smothers me like a toxic cloud, choking off my usual genial countenance. I’m not going to go into a political tirade here. We all have our own ideas about things and the beauty of the system (so far anyway) is that we all get our own opportunity to weigh in in another couple of weeks. I’m impatient by nature so I’m having a hard time waiting for the resolution. I sure hope the mountain of agitation will finally become dormant but I suspect the rumblings will not go quietly away and the lawyers will probably flow like molten lava across the land laying down a swath of human misery.

So meanwhile, we watch and we wait…