ONE DAY IN SPARTA

sparta

Lunch with Jim Winfield at the Mexican restaurant, Misarados, my plow. It's a good place for lunch. Very successful restaurant. The Mexican restaurant before it was a good one too, but one of the employees embezzled it out of business. The people with the restaurant now came along and made a go of it as a family business. Everyone working there is in the family. They did with their kids what Mexicans come to USA to do, give the kids a better life. I've watched these kids grow up and by the time they're out of school, they are capable, on the ball people. The whole town has taken to the place over the years for the good food, good prices and good service. It's where I learned I don't care much for Mexican music, but for salsa. The trumpet and iy-yi-yi-yi music is, I'm sure, great at local dances in Mexico. I expect if I were to hear such a band playing at a dance someplace in Mexico, I'd love it. It has a vibrant spirit. But it grabs my attention about like Lawrence Welk. Next.

Saw an interesting Chinese film today, BE WITH ME, an art film out of Hong Kong. Art film out of Hong Kong means no guns. I took it for Hong Kong because everyone wore shorts and light tshirts, semi-tropical. It was a quiet looks into the lives of several people who interweave through the story, such that by the end, it all comes together as things work out. Beautifully filmed. Almost no talking. Very little. The drama amounted to the relationships of the different people. One of the characters was a blind woman in her 60s who is capable of basic cooking, cleaning house, wrapping presents, doing everything by feel and memory. She is one of the characters in the story, plays herself. She's a blind woman who handles it very well. The relationships that seem early on to be simple everyday life relationships turn intense by the end in matter of fact ways, as in life. They're everyday people going about their lives.

It turns out everyone has a loneliness that drives them in whatever ways they go. And it has no stars. Some of the people know each other and some don't. It's everyday life with natural intensities instead of big drama intensities with fights and guns and explosions. There is the elderly man who takes an interest in cooking for the blind woman, which brought him up out of his depression. Quiet relationship stories that wove a kind of mental tapestry that seems like very little is going on until toward the end when things start falling into place. Much, Oh, so that's what.... Beautiful, soft spoken, plain looking people--no one looked like a movie star. I believe I'll see it tomorrow too. It's one to see twice, to enjoy it again.

I stopped in at the Hospice office after filling the tank with gas and buying a cross-bar tire-iron for the trunk. Now I'm set. At Hospice I visited with Vickie Todd awhile, saw Michelle and Donna. They were so important in my mission to keep Jr at home, I'm grateful for them every day. I like to stop in from time to time, to keep in touch, to remember what special people they are. In my time of retirement, thanks to Social Security, I am staying on my mountain, which was my initial purpose coming to the mountains. I wasn't ready then. I'm ready now. The people I see are my friends, people who don't spin webs of trouble where they go, nobody playing one-upmanship games, nobody positioning themselves on the hierarchical ladder of status. The people I like the most are satisfied with their absence of status, don't want it, and psychological games are not even a consideration. I'm so free of those kinds of games now that when I meet somebody who likes to play games like Gotcha and It's your fault, control and dominance, it stands out like an alarm going off. I think, Later for this, and find the cat hole.

Something else I don't miss stayin on my mountain. "You know what you oughta do!" and, "You needta," and you gotta be there, you gotta see it, you gotta hear it, you gotta buy it, you gotta have it. You gotta, oughta, needta. I've got so bad that when somebody says, You know what you oughta do? I say, Yes. That's the end of it. It comes across to the other as rude, but somebody telling me what I oughta do, when I know for a certainty they do not know, is rude in my way of seeing. When it comes down to answering the question about a pet peeve, I suppose this is mine. It's nothing but thoughtlessness, the kind of thing that you wouldn't say if you thought about it before saying it.

Stopped in at the BROC office and talked with Donna, who was taking care of the place today. Since Betty Bledsoe died, we have a replacement now. Since I'm with BROC I like to know the new people. I used to stop and see Betty from time to time, smoke cigarettes and talk. I miss Betty. I'm glad she went out fast, for her sake. She'd been with BROC as long as I've been in the mountains. It's the only organization with meetings that I want to stay with in Sparta. The others were civic sorts of things that belong to people involved in Sparta, which I'm not anymore. There are plenty of people in Sparta I like to see. I find when I go to town now, I make it a point to stop by and see somebody at work for a few minutes, keeping in touch. It used to be that when I went to Sparta I came home depressed. Now, I come home lit up and feeling good, because I've visited with friends I've not seen in a matter of months. Like I went to pay property taxes the other day and I know everybody in the tax office, had to talk with everybody, came out of there feeling well and happy. I'm finding there's a great number of people I care a very great deal for.