Tumbleweeds
While shopping today in Tampa, I had an epiphany. Maybe true happiness isn't achieved by having everything you desire, but rather by accepting that you may never posess these things (material or otherwise)and even if you do, your chances for hanging onto them are slim. This came to me while walking through Hyde Park and taking inventory of the stores remaining. Most of the good shops and restaurants are gone and the anchor tennant (once Jacobsons) is now a Lifestyle Family Fitness Center. Even the damn Shaper Image is closed, although I think they're getting creamed by Brookstone. The point is that I half expected the tumbleweeds to start blowing through at 6:30 on a Saturday evening. I began to think back to all the pleasant times I had there. Shopping, getting into trouble, drinking coffee, hanging out at whatever festival was going on that day. There was always something going on down there. Some of the happiest times of my life were in Hyde Park and South Tampa and it exists now only as a skeleton of its former slendor. Do you ever feel like you would give up whatever future you have in store just to relive a time when you were happy? To have certain people back in your life the way they used to be? To make your heart feel something that died so long ago you don't remember how it happened? Today I also learned that Verbena smells like lemon. I hope one of these observations helps each of you in live journal land.