Okay, here we have a blog entry starting at a fairly normal time of night - that would be about 9:15. This is part of a campaign to get my sleep cycle straightened out....not that I think it'll work, just that I think I ought, really, to be making the effort.

Last night, I didn't fall asleep until about 4:30 - 5:00 -ish, and when I did had one of those sleep paralysis episodes. Then the tire was flat on the right front side of the car, so that had to be replaced. $150! Yikes. You'd think that would motivate me to go to work, but, instead I fell asleep on the sofa ( I had called out of the temp job-in-a-box on account of the tire ) This is getting out of hand.

I would love to know what is wrong with me that I can't sleep at night. It would be wonderful if I had the means to have a "sleep study" though I worry that I would make for quite a study, and that I'd never get out and eventually just be bouncing around in a rubber room.

As opposed to just kind of bouncing around my own home. Still, though, I don't think that staring at a CRT screen at 1:30 in the morning is condusive to then going up stairs and falling asleep, so I'm really going to try to cut that out.

I did get one thing accomplished today though. I moved two rose bushes in my yard which were in shady, over-run-by-other plants areas of my yard and put them in a sunny spot over by the pond. The pond is still totally green with algea, but that 's another problem.

I had no idea that roses could be so tough! Both of these were making a mighty effort to compete with the flora around them, but they practically had no root system. According to Friend WillJune is National Rose Month, so I was doing something in a timely way. Who knew? I had gone out and dug these enormous holes to transplant them and it turned out they were like all these little sticks. I know that roses are a really ancient flower which originated in Persia - that would be where Iran and Iraq are today, and that wild roses and "salt marsh roses" are really tough plants....but I still tend to think of the kind of roses that would be in a yard as somewhat delicate. These are some scrappy little plants, so I hope they do really well in the sunny location to which I moved them.

I have no idea what kind of roses they are. The one that I relocated from the shade garden at the very back of the property looks like a climbing something, which means I'll have to put a trellis up. More work, but what the hell. The other one, which had been going head to head with an iris or under the overhang of the garage could be anything. I find myself hoping that they're red roses.

Red roses make me think of Grandfather Elliott, who died when I was 7. I missed him terribly throughout my childhood, because he was such a force of unconditional love in my life and he just exuded wisdom and understanding. I always had the idea that my life would have been easier, that he would have helped me get a grip on things I struggled with, if he had lived longer. Still, though, a person doesn't have to be alive to give you the lessons of their life.

He died when I was in the second grade, at the height of the rose blossoming season. June 20th. I never forgot the date. Every year, after that, for all these years on that day I wake up and think, "this is the day Grandfather died" and then, right away, I remember a beautiful scene of a proffusion of red roses which was his yard.

Grandfather Elliott had a rough life. He had been orphaned and seperated from his brothers and sisters. He spent some time running around just sort of wild on the streets of Baltimore, and after awhile he joined the Navy where he had a whole series of weird things happen to him that make my life look pretty normal. This is the kind of man he was: He had a job as a house painter. It was a steady, good paying job and nobody gave him any trouble about anything. But the owner was sleeping with the wife of another one of his employees. He would send the guy whose wife he was sleeping with out to some distant place and then go sleep with his wife. This just drove Grandfather crazy. He didn't have anything in it. He really needed the job. He knew it wasn't his place to tell the guy "hey, the owner is sleeping with your wife". He couldn't stand it. He had to quit, and so he did.

So what I'm saying here, when I'm talking about these roses, is that this wasn't some patrician guy who had everything going for him and grew these beautiful roses and was mellow. He had nothing going for him and had to work for everything he had, which was basically a row house with a little bit of yard in the Curtis Bay area of Baltimore before it went to hell on a sled because of drugs.

Even in those days, the 70's, it wasn't exactly an upscale neighborhood. People tended to have a lot of stuff piled up in their back yards, which all had chain link fences seperating them and backed up to an alley where there was all kinds of commotion, from kids playing, to "Arabers" selling watermellon, to people running through on their way from questionable circumstances. There were kids pools and St. Bernard dogs,old boats and mismatched lawn furniture, bundles of newspapers and piles of bricks. But not in Grandfather's yard. Not only were there mounding red roses flowing down the slope of the front yard of his house, in the back yard there was a little patch of green, trimmed grass and there were roses all around the perimeter. In the back there were all long stemmed tea roses, formal roses, roses that scented the air for blocks, as well as climbers that clung to the fence. The yard looked great, the roses were looked great, even with Grandfather dying of emphasima.

These were roses so breathtakingly beautiful, with such an attitude of grace, such deep, rich colors...some of the reds were so deep and velvety they were almost black in the middle. The scents were better than the best perfume, and when they were really in bloom nothing in that alley overcame that scent. Those roses had no idea that they were not living in Rolland Park or Cross Keys or the Taj Mahal. They had a destiny to flower and beautify the world, they had a guy who came out and trimmed them at the right times and spread coffee grounds around their roots to feed them, so they, like Grandfather, gave it all they had. They bloomed where they were planted. They did the best they could with what they had. They overcame the smell of the neighbors trash cans and the strange chemical smells of Curtis Bay.

Nothing is forever, except for the pictures in our minds. In real life, the roses faded. My grandmother sold the house and moved to senior apartment and died when she was 80. It isn't safe for anybody to walk the streets of that neighborhood any more day or night. Like the roses, it fought a valient fight, but it lost. I doubt sincerly that anyone who is living in that house would know how to care for the rose bushes. They might not even know that they are roses. Still, it wouldn't surprise me if there is still a climbing rose or two left, still struggeling, winding around a fence post, peeking out from behind a garbage can. I wouldn't be surprised to see some remenant still remaining of the primary color days of my grade school mind: bright green grass, deep red roses, bright blue sky. And who knows? The roses might have even taken over the yard. Stranger things have happened.