Let me try this again.
Tried it once last week; I couldn't bear to publish it. It's gone now, probably for the best.
Last Wednesday I was staying in Glasgow with my daughter and her fiancé at the Commonwealth Games, but that day I had a job to do, and so I got up early and walked to the station in Glasgow, got an early train down to our hometown in Gourock.
It was the train that I always got home from university 35 years ago.
I appreciated that train journey on Wednesday, the views, the stations, the people.
The memories. How the world opens up when you get past Bishopton, how the Clyde opens up, and the mountains open up, how magnificently beautiful it is.
I didn't always see that view.
I kind of wish I had now.
I walked up from the station along the river, then up the big steep hill to mum and dad's house.
My job that day was to clear the house, or at least part of it, with my sister-in-law and my niece. My mum and dad have moved north, way, way north, with my brother; they're not capable of looking after themselves anymore.
My dad always used to read this blog, every single day; I used to write to him.
He can't read it anymore.
I had a day of going through things that someone had built their whole life on, which was to be cast aside, taken to the recycling or the charity shop, or just put in the bucket.
It reminded me to declutter my own life and my own house, and then I was taken back to a meeting I had 2 days before in my office, for someone oohed and ahed about all the trinkets that I've collected around me, all the things of significance, and I realised that somebody else would be doing that to me, to my stuff, not far down the line.
There is a time for sadness and memories and reflection, and Wednesday was a time for that.
I got back on the train about 2:303030 and reversed the journey, the journey that I took up once for the first time to go to Glasgow as a student in dentistry. The journey that I made a million times after that, I wonder if I will ever make that journey again, or if that chapter of my life is closed.
It does not do to dwell on the past, and it does not do to sit with ghosts, but neither should we ever forget where we came from.
I didn't have much growing up, but it never felt like that because there were people surrounding me that catapulted me to a place that was beyond my wildest dreams.
The responsibility that comes with that is enormous, and sometimes it makes me feel sad because I'm not where I came from, and that's just a small part of the place that I need to be.
Fear Thee Well.
Blog Post Number - 4624
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