You'll Never Believe This

Last night, in his Jeep on the way home from LAX, B told me that I cannot post this on my blog. "You'll lose all your credibility," he said. "No one will ever believe it."

So what am I about to do?

Why, post it on my blog, of course.

Yep.

*******

When T and I visit his parents in Pennsylvania, we sleep in the basement/rec room. There's a hid-a-bed couch down there, as well as the normal den type things: old pictures, a spare computer or two, a bathroom, a laundry room, old books, etc.

The both fantastic and disconcerting thing about the basement too, is that it's just about pitch black, all the time. There are wooden shutters blocking light from the above-ground windows near the ceiling, and when you close them and turn off the overhead lights, your circadian rhythms (a.k.a. the things that wake you up when sunlight floods your sleeping eyelids) go down the tubes.

Great for sleeping in after a 3 hour time change, bad for productivity and making breakfast/brunch appointments.

In addition to the increased ability to sleep in (which I'm very grateful for as I've long been cursed with an early-riser tendency), I'm affected by the utter darkness when it comes to my dreaming.

I have funky dreams.

At least, for the first several nights I do. Which ordinarily means that on the night before we leave, I sleep like a log. True to form on this visit, I dreamt about hurricanes, murderers, insane asylums, and post-apocalyptic scenarios in which computers had taken over the world internet-style (as in them being invisible but everywhere), and could read your minds laptop-with-a-wireless-network-card-style, which meant that although I was leading a subversive group, I could only think of the revolution in snippets, of a duration of less than two seconds each.

No, I never said I was normal.

Anyway, on the worst night, actually the one with a combined insane asylum, murderer, horror movieish flash-forwards filled with blood and guns, and ghosts reminiscent of The Ring (SO scary) dream included, I woke T up in the middle of the night and he put me back to sleep with a Ben Folds song:

Goodnight, goodnight sweet baby
The world has more for you
Than it seems
Goodnight, goodnight
Let the moonlight take the lid off your dreams

We took a small flight
In the middle of the night
From one tiny place to another
And my parents they remained
At the shack with Lorraine
And my aunt and my Grandpa and brother
We walked past the tarmac
And boarded the craft
The rain had me chilled to the bones
Just the three of us took flight that night
Uncle Richard, me and James Earl Jones...

It worked like a charm and I was out cold by the last line.

The next morning, both T and I had that song still playing in our heads, and we got on a James Earl Jones discussion. Yes, he's a great actor with an amazingly deep voice, not to mention stellar diction. Was he English, T asked? No, American, I think, I replied. But wait, I wondered, hadn't he died? Hmm....I racked my brain as I tried to recall movies I'd seen him in lately. Nope, there haven't been much. I think he passed away.

No, T said with confidence. He's definitely still around. But I wasn't convinced. With all of the legends who've left us in the past few years, I was pretty sured that JEJ was one of them. We decided to IMDB him later, but never got around to it.

So days passed and we went hiking and out for dinner and then left super super early to avoid any mishaps in this flight, and checked in, printed our boarding passes, and got drinks and french fries in the airport to kill time. We found a spot to sit on the floor of our gate by a window, and watched the rain fall on jets outside.
Finally, our row was called and we stood in line to scan our tickets, then waited in the vacuum cleaner hose (my name for it since I was little, not mature but I like it), and as I cringed from the cold winds and water droplets sneaking into our space through rips in the hose's canvas, we finally made our way onto the plane.

I was off in my own world of pondering random things, like how I could see the tarmac WAY below as I stepped onto the plane, but didn't flinch when my foot fell right along the seam - isn't that counter intuitive? -when T looked back over his shoulder at me with a smirk that he was trying to hide. I recognized "the eyebrows" at once.

"Charis, I think our question is about to be answered."

I had no idea what he was talking about.

However, as he shuffled forward, my eyes fell on the first passenger, seated on the first row, wearing a sharp light gray suit and reading a magazine in his lap.

It was James Earl Jones.

I nearly fell over.

I felt my lungs spasming and I in no way cooly walked past, incrediby embarassed because I can't abide being one of those people when there's a celebrity around, but I couldn't help it.

How weird was that?

And I knew that, if he in any way was conscious of us, he certainly knew that we were having a fit about him being there, but I just couldn't think of a polite way to explain it, so we just passed and I did my best to smother my laughter and "I can't believe it!" outbursts in T's shoulder blades.

"Now we just need to find an Uncle Richard," he muttered to me, as I dissolved into a giggling puddle on the floor.

The End.

Yes, it did really happen.

Today's whiteboard quote:
"The best day of your life is the one on which you decide your life is your own. No apologies or excuses. No one ot lean on, rely on, or blame. The gift is yours - it is an amazing journey - and you alone are responsible for the quality of it. This is the day your life really begins." ~Bob Moawad