It seemed to get a bit of Heaven you really did have to go through some hell. And now I wasn’t sure I’d have time to feel that Heaven.
Would we be victorious tomorrow? Only time would really tell.
Chapter 14
Bill
“You want another steak?” I asked as I got up with my plate.
“Sure,” Zion replied. “I’m hungry tonight. All that training.”
“Yeah, it will work up an appetite alright.” I grabbed the last two steaks off the grill and put them on our plates. Then I returned to the table handing Zion her steak.
“Ah, that’s great,” she said.
We were having a nice, romantic barbecue dinner on a perfect evening after a long day of training, with some sweet breaks here and there for hot lovemaking. It was enough of a motivation to keep training that was for sure.
“So, tell me about your earliest memory,” I said as I dug into my steak.
Zion looked at me like I was crazy and then started laughing. “What do you mean?”
“Well, your earliest memory, your fondest one at least.”
Zion smiled and leaned back in her chair as she tried to think of something. I ate a few pieces of steak and waited for her to come up with something. Then she finally had it. She leaned forward and looked into my eyes.
“Ok, I think I was four or five and I was in the mall with my mom. I was right beside her, but then I remember I saw a doll or stuffed animal in a window of a nearby shop so I ran towards it. I was there a few minutes and then I realized my mom wasn’t with me. I turned around and started to look but she was gone. I had to run around for several minutes until she finally located me. Then she bought me ice cream and made over me to tell me how sorry she was. She ran into a friend of hers and stopped to talk to them and didn’t see that I wasn’t there for several minutes.”
“I don’t see how that is a good memory,” I said.
“Because my mother acted genuinely worried and concerned about me. She acted like I mattered. My mother often let her job and other people come first. She was always trying to be part of upper society. And I felt like I was often left behind or cast aside. But right there in that moment I knew that my mother was genuinely worried about me.”
I nodded and tried not to act shocked. But this was a pretty traumatizing thing for a child to go through, feeling that their mother doesn’t really love them. That’s got to be about the worst thing I could think of that would scar a child.
“That’s pretty terrible,” I said.
“Well, what is your first good memory?”
“I’m not sure I can top that one, but I’ll try. I think the first memory I have is that I was playing baseball outside in the yard and my dad was working on this old car we had that he was determined to get running one day. Anyway, I was playing ball and I was hoping he would actually pay attention to something I was doing and that he would give me some sort of praise. Anyway, I was playing and I threw my ball through the air and I ran after it to catch it. I tripped over this big log sticking up out of the ground and it felt like I snapped my ankle. I went down hard on the ground. I was in pain but mostly I was mad at myself that I’d done something that stupid with my dad around. I thought he was going to yell at me and call me an idiot, but instead he came over and made sure that I was ok. He picked me up and hugged me and told me how proud he was of me and how much he loved me.”
Zion was smiling. “That’s really great. A good memory.”
“Yeah, it was ok. I wish I could go back to some of those simpler times again. I find as I get older I spend a lot of time looking back and wanting to do everything all over again, fix the mistakes of the past.”
“I think that’s human nature,” she said. “We all would love to go back and have some do overs.”
“Right,” I said. “That’s something that is pretty universal, but I think I have a bigger case of that than most people do. I really want to go back and make some big changes to things. But it isn’t going to happen so I spend as much time as I can thinking about the present and the future. I try to make every day count as much as possible.”
“I like that philosophy,” she said.