One Early Monday Evening

Ever have one of those days in which you find yourself just a little bit flustered from the events of the day and you find yourself craving for just a few minutes of alone time?

A few weeks ago, I had a Monday just like that. I had some personal business that I really didn't want to take of that day but had to, and coupled with the fact that an unfortunate family crisis landed going into the weekend, left me more than just a little flustered and aggravated. I had spent the rest of the day at home looking for a brief respite/refuge from those particular events, but I wasn't having any luck.

Around lunch tie, I had originally decided to treat the family to lunch at Wings over Newington, but because a few family members were temporarily misplaced, I had to change plans. I instead went to Subway to treat the family to lunch and told Mrs. G. B. that she needed to take something out for dinner later that evening.

The evening's dinner eventually rounded itself out to be a homemade onion-bacon-cheeseburger, a fresh salad and some fries. I said to myself, "HA! I'll have dinner outside and enjoy the warm summer weather!"

So after nuking some Italian style minute rice to replace the non-existent french fries and pouring myself a diet root beer, I brought my food outside and planted my ass in my new outdoor writing area to have a bit of supper and some peace and quiet.

I say "new outdoor writing area", 'cause my entire backyard is one perfect shade zone. The sun approaches from our side of the street, and with the extremely tall shady trees to my left, one tall shady tree to my right, and Cedar Mountain behind me, I was in heaven.

So I sat there, having a rather leisurely mean, enjoying the warm sun and leafy shade (alas, no breeze to speak off) and basically emptying my brain, my spirit and my soul of the annoyances of the day, when I happened to spot an old plastic chair sitting in the middle of the yard.

I didn't think about why or how it got there, since earlier in the afternoon my daughter had decided to sit outside in the sun to play a game on her I-Phone. Yeah, you can now insert comment on how children have a tendency to do the opposite of what normal people do. But the chair got my attention in a way that most things do nowadays, and it got me to thinking.

Mostly, it got me thinking about the way it was situated, in that it wasn't quite balanced as it was resting on three legs instead of four. So as it sat there, an image immediately popped into my head. The unpleasant image of someone sitting in the chair getting ready to be executed by a firing squad.

Now, I'm not sure why that particular image popped into my head, but it seemed like a natural fit. From that particular image, I actually started creating a scene in my head to fit that particular image. Was the person sitting there strapped in? Sure. Was the typical firing squad there? Actually, no. It was one individual who was standing a few feet from the chair, and that idea I pulled from an award winning photograph taken during the Vietnam War.

Anyways, I spent the rest of my dinner quietly building the rest of the scene and trying to figure out why that particular image originally popped into my head. The best I was able to come up with, was this:

Sitting in my quiet backyard, with the sun beating down and looking at a semi-dried pond and the tilted chair, conjured up the image of the quiet aftermath of a battlefield, and I somehow got transported to that very same scene in my mind.

What do you think? Did the stresses of the day somehow pushed me into a particular direction that under normal circumstances I wouldn't have even given a second thought to? Or do I simply have an incredibly vivid imagination?