Making Friends From Supposed Family Members

My sisters live in a house between where I work and where I live, and where my parents live some five miles away from me. Therefore it's not at all too uncommon to run into them from time to time, be it at Walmart, or out at the farm, or just see them driving by and honking and waving and acting crazy like our entire family tends to do.

Therefore it was no surprise for me, when on my way home from work down highway 75, to see me sister driving along in her Subaru Outback. I was coming up behind her, confirmed it was her when I saw the 20 county license plates on her car, and could see her her in the drivers seat. So I punched the accelerator just a bit, whipped around her, and pulled up almost even, laying into the horn and waving, all the while grinning like a crazy man...

Yah, well, it wasn't her. The lady turned her head, and I realized she didn't have long blond hair, she had long rather white hair, and was probably pushing 60 years old. Her husband (I assume) was in the passenger seat just staring at me like "Who the hell...?" as I drove on by. They did wave back, a small consolation for my bumbling foolish drive by honking.

I guess all in all it isn't too bad. I don't know of anyone else driving a Commemorative Edition SRT-4 around here, with it's distinctive viper racing stripes, so I'd have to say I probably made some new friends. I don't know if I will ever run into them again, but I can tell you this much.... I will never again just assume there is only one 20 county Subaru Outback in the state of Nebraska.

Where's Your Freaking Alligator???

Does anyone else find it rather ironic that Betty White is doing commercials for PetMeds.com? She seems so wonderful and grandmotherly as she discusses getting low cost medication delivered right to her door. But all the time I'm watching her on the commercial, all I can think about is that movie Lake Placid, where she had a 30 foot long 2000 lb man eating alligator for a pet. Honestly, I kept waiting for her to turn and toss a big old pill to her monster gator at the end of the commercial. Damn that was a horrible movie but I'll never think of Betty White in the same way again after seeing it.

Normality?

It’s been seven months since I got back from the Sandbox. After a couple of months everything was normal again. Now back in Nebraska, working, with our lil’ one due in August, I don’t think much about my time in Iraq, except for the occasional time I do happen to hear the news of another fellow soldier losing his or her life, or the thoughts of friends going back over.

So I was at work the other day, actually down in one of the classrooms, when there was a very loud muffled bang from outside, I’m not sure if they were using dynamite somewhere or what exactly was going on, but instantly the hair stood up on my neck and I was leaning over in my chair, as though I would go under the table or something. It took a few seconds to catch my breath, and I found I was breathing very hard, my heart rate was elevated, blinking fast, and other symptoms of a sudden onset of adrenaline when the body reacts to fear.

No one noticed, they were all laughing and carrying on, the same thing I would have probably been doing two years previous, the sound of an explosion or something large hitting the side of the building would be more of an afterthought than anything else. My reaction was not something I expected at all. I have always been of the belief that I would get my life back to normal, that nothing would affect me once I got back home and my life was back on track. There were so many others I knew, even those I loved, who have been in a lot worse situations over there than I was ever in.

I felt embarrassed later in the day, because honestly, I was never closer than maybe a couple hundred meters from any contact with enemy fire, which, oddly enough, occurred at our home base with a little more than a couple of months left, while I was sitting on the toilet. And despite it being a reasonable distance from me, it shook the small building, and sounded as though it landed right behind me.

There were lots of explosions like that, but further away. Usually we were out on the road or at other bases. But you become bred to ducking down, to covering up, heading for the bunkers placed strategically throughout the area in every camp you are in. I really believed that you could just forget that, and walk away and nothing would take you back there, yet for that split second, my body may have been in a classroom, but my mind was back in that dry, blistering heat of Iraq.