It is a few days until Thanksgiving. The Holiday Season is here. It is time to purchase Christmas presents, decorate the Christmas Tree, and visit St. Charles, Missouri. We have not visited St. Charles since 2019. Then came Our Pandemic which never left… We saw Aaron Neville at Powell Hall in January 2020…and then we went home and stayed for a year or more…with little contact involving people, all the businesses were closed as well as SIUC and theatres and our church. It was a Brooks Family tradition to visit St. Charles each Black Friday…until it was not. There will be Santa Claus and St. Nicholas and Father Noel and elves and Mr. Scrooge and Tiny Tim…and even the Ghost of Christmas at St. Charles.

Margo and Jeff are coming and we are excited… We had been visiting Europe and the United Kingdom every two years…until Our Pandemic. Being with Margo and Jeff is great fun!

Life as we knew it changed…and is still changing due to the Pandemic. History will be the judge of just how drastically we have changed. We are in the middle of the Great Change…and can not truly see the ramifications of it due to our myopic perspective.

Cold and misty was the order of today. The leaves are mostly on the ground. Change surrounds us. We humans believe that we are in control. Many of us are control addicts. We do not enjoy feeling out of control. We like every I dotted and every T crossed. We enjoy our routine and we do not enjoy having it disrupted.

I enjoy my trips to Eldorado. Each time that I am there I recall how I felt when I was walking the streets of the little town…and how it feels to walk them now. It seems like just a short time since I was a child in Eldorado…but it has been over 50 years. Time is a peculiar mysterious and liquid dimension. When we think that our exploits are memorable and compelling and something that deserved to be memorialized…all we have to do is watch a family member scatter the ashes of their cremated loved one over the ocean.

I saw the most interesting of movies the other night where the ending revealed that the characters in the flick had been living in a computer simulation. I was totally blindsided at the surprise thriller ending and reflected on the Quantum Physics idea that all of us are simply members of a computer simulation and that helps explain the occasional glitches that we encounter from time to time.

It has been said that dust we are and to dust, we return… Indeed we are spiritual beings in earthen vessels. What we see…and do we see the same things…is malleable and breaks down into its molecular components.

Love is what we leave behind after we are no longer here. Love is our legacy.