Contemplating broken dreams as life is winding down

It's that kind of day, thinking about what I wanted to happen in my life compared to what actually did. Come to think of it I was grateful I survived. I used to ask God just to let me live to 70 years old to be with my family, and he could take me any time after that. Here I am to be 79 next month so it looks like I got a bonus. Still I find old age to be lonelier than I expected it to be. Guess that stands to reason when people I know are passing from these realms every few weeks.
Next week there will be another memorial service in here for Clyde who had become a recluse due to poor health in the last few years, so there might not be too many there who remember him but many will be going to support Barbara, his wife, who was a very active figure around the complex. I saw her in the swimming pool a couple of times just before Clyde died. She was always having a little grandchild over to tend, so Clyde was seeing her family in the apartment all the time. It was very hard for him to get into a wheel chair or scooter anymore. Both legs were shriveled from having polio in childhood.
I like to think of him springing out of his old body with shoulders over developed during the years following paralysis and walking on two healthy legs again, in the spirit world of course.
I was amused to find the reasons there can be no god posted on Facebook by Bill, my most frequent critic. Carl Sagan, the famous astronomer, and another who did not believe in the existence of God, is his favorite author. Stands to reason Bill would be an atheist. That's all right. He is allowed. I also remember reading Brocca's Brain by Carl Sagan where he scoffed at the idea of people imagining they could dream about the future. I thought well, great astronomer that he is, Carl Sagan does not know everything because I have had many quite startlingly specific dreams about a future event which came to pass. And I have known others who had similar dreams. Prophets, shamans, mediums, psychics, and just ordinary people have been having these dreams for thousands of years, but there are always folks in the crowd who could not be convinced by any reasonable proof. It is their loss.

So I really have no problem in believing there is an afterlife, but it is just getting through the last difficult years when it's more difficult to get around that I am concerned about. I do expect to record all the changes in my perceptions as departure approaches. I think they will be quite interesting.
I do perceive the spirit as much lighter than our form here and capable of getting places a great deal faster. That will be a boon. Then I can attend events I can't now even though I will be invisible, only there in spirit. Right now I am envying the spirits their fast access. If I were a spirit I would be visiting in Utah all the next month, taking in the 4th of July where my son Raymond will be emceeing a big annual talent show. He will also be playing with a band he has gotten together for the festival in the middle of July. As it is now, if I struggled up there in my body, my relatives would all be alarmed at how stiff my knees had gotten and that I seemed capable of toppling over at any given moment.
I have begun posting my memoirs again and they would be nervous about their effects on people reading my blog in Utah, as indicated on my neo counter. I had four encounters with a second hired man who began to use me in what I considered a form of revenge on my father who he resented and evidently thought was a bad man not deserving of his good fortune in acquiring ranches and property with the help of his father. I had to include him in my memoirs since he had a considerable stressful impact on my life. I have acknowledged the bad behaviors of my father as well in writing these memoirs.
I did not anticipate there being such a fallout to writing the story of my childhood, but if you are the target of criminal activities, your journey back into the past may not be welcome by many. I could not very well ignore these criminal activities by two men since they were part of the reason I, too, was crippled in childhood as surely as if I had had polio. My father's bad drinking and my mother's angry response were other reasons I am sure that I developed chronic fatigue syndrome as a child about which little is still known. I think a mysterious virus I contracted played a role, since I was the only child in town to come down with it.
Any dreams I had of a great career, fame, and fortune were broken along with my stamina. It takes stamina to have a successful career in this world. I knew my health had been broken by the time I was twenty years old. Now I would have to figure out how to live with disability and hope that I could work enough to feed my family when I needed to.
Once you have become accustomed to your limitations it is as though you have never been any other way. My twenty years in a poor Mexican neighborhood was spent there because of disability. These poor people knew how to be poor and still have a good time and enjoy life. They taught me some valuable lessons in playing the hand that fate deals you. Which is your destiny.
Some more success oriented people from my background scoffed at the idea there could be such a disability. There were other words for what I had--laziness was one of them. So I would distance myself if I could not handle reactions. I migrated you might say to another country from where I was raised. Arizona did not know me so maybe they would accept me better. Arizonans were certainly used to accepting the poor migrant. They have a long history of it.
I did think that my original country, Utah, would be served by my telling my story. They needed to address any wrongs that might have occurred to try to see that such injustices did not happen so easily again. I was born into a family of alcoholic sons. The Mormon members of the family did not deal well with alcoholism nor with the homosexual behaviors that developed as a result of men spending long weeks camped out without the company of women and other causes I am sure.
People still struggle today with homosexual behaviors. The Mormon church launched off a big campaign to fight gay marriage which succeeded in defeating the proposed measure in California, infuriating the large population of gays who are out with it and vocal. I believe that gays should have what they want in this instance because they believe it will help them to be happier in a very difficult life style, a style most of them say was not chosen.
I certainly did not think my mother and dad's marriage which was one affected by secrets and lies was preferable. I believe there must be honesty at all costs, and the admitting of gay feelings is very apt to break up a heterosexual marriage sooner or later. The Mormon church seems to promote the keeping of secrets in order to sustain marriage between a man and a woman. I experienced that as a marriage made in hell. People are not urged to tell the truth. Where is the religion in living a lie?
I had to keep silent for decades about perceiving my father's homosexual side as a mere child because that society was not conducive to telling the truth about that. I have meant to surface the lies. This marriage almost destroyed both my mother and dad.
So people have to be careful what policies they promote as religious for fear they are neither wise or honest. I would be constantly trying to rebuke my parents for lying. Is that the role we want our children to have to play? I would say homosexual behavior is one of the deepest darkest secrets married people still harbor. I figured my dad had lied constantly since childhood. If a child is rewarded for lying, is he going to stop? He lied when he got married. And he kept on lying. Pretty soon my mother was tempted to stray and she began to lie on a much grander scale than she had ever done before.
And I got caught in the middle and nearly crushed by the jealous participant in one of his affairs who violated my innocence. My mother's secret participants in her affairs were always a threat to the shaky stability of our 'home.' Other wives whose husbands were unfaithful in like manner retreated deep into religion and pretended all was well. All living a lie. And who wants to shoot the messenger who brings out the truth? People who live in fantasy, that is who. Who become even more ferocious about protecting their relationships if they sense they are unstable.
I am the messenger who might get shot for revealing the harsh truths of my childhood and that is a fact, so I stay in exile, in another country, recognizing there are all kinds of reasons why you might not be able to go home again.