TheBanyanTree: Happy Birthday Stew!

[Monique Colver]

Stew would be 38 today, had he lived long enough. I suppose he's stopped
aging now though, but I'll still celebrate his birthday. Entirely
coincidentally, I'm going to a party tonight with a few hundred of my
closest and dearest friends.

 That's not exactly true. I'll be going to a party tonight with a few
hundred people that I don't know, the vast majority of which I've never met
at all, though there may be one or two I met at last year's party, or last
summer's picnic. Stew would hate something like this. He'd come long enough
for dinner, which had better be spectacular because I'm driving 3 hours each
way for it, then retire to the hotel room upstairs to watch tv, or he'd go
to a movie. Not that he didn't like people, but he liked them in small
doses, not in one big overwhelming mass of humanity.

I can certainly see his point. And he could sense things from others that
aren't usually detectable, the slightest whiff of a downturned nature, the
merest scent of a detestable personality, the ghost of a past best kept
secret. I once visited a client and took him along since she wanted help
moving, and Stew was an excellent mover of things. He and his best friend
Jake had a habit of moving themselves and others frequently, and when the
subject came up he was always available to help. He once drove up from
California to Washington to help charming husband and I move, though even
then he couldn't do a lot of actual lifting and carrying, but that was okay,
he was enormously valuable. We felt honored that he would make that trip
just to help us.

But I digress. So I took him with me to this client's, and she took us into
her basement. It was an older house, and the basement was low-ceilinged and
a bit claustrophobic, but neat, with items stacked in their proper places
and nothing out of place. When we got back upstairs I noticed Stew was
white, the color drained out of him altogether. He said he was okay, and we
left shortly thereafter.

I asked him what had happened, and he told me he didn't know, but he
wouldn't go back down there, there was something down there, or there had
been something down there, or something had happened down there, he wasn't
sure, but he would not go back there.

I never doubted him. Why would I? Even I, of the tribe of the dense, have
noticed a certain sense of foreboding in some places, or a certain whiff of
something to be avoided. He could see auras too, and I'd often ask him what
color I was. He didn't talk about it much.

So a party with hundreds of strangers, many of them neutral altogether, but
some giving off what I can only describe as a sensation of some sort,
something we can feel but not see, hear, smell, touch, nor taste, some of
them good, some of them not, could be so overwhelming if one is sensitive to
that. What a cacophony that would create! How can one think or navigate
through that?

We shall be at a party tonight, and I shall raise my glass in a toast to
him, and he will be glad he doesn't have to be at the damned party too.
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-- 
Monique Colver