A crazy jumble of [stuff] going through my head…
Here are some quotes I’ve been saving up. Inspiring, frivolous, hopefully entertaining:
I am never more generous than when I split open an avocado, see that it’s perfect, and agree to share half with my husband.
Mia Leimkuhler in The New York Times
There’s a book called 222 Cemeteries to See Before You Die by Loren Rhoads. Makes me wonder if there isn’t a cemetery tour or something after you die. If there isn’t such a thing, there should be…
Me
Music is the reward for being alive.
Jorma Kaukonen (guitarist/singer, founding member of Jefferson Airplane and Hot Tuna)
I can’t possibly be this ancient. I haven’t had enough time to prepare myself to be this old.
The father of Martin Hesp on or near his 67th birthday. M. Hesp is a British journalist and blogger
When you come to Philly [to play baseball], you forget about nutrition. You eat the cheesesteaks in the visiting clubhouse.
Freddie Freeman (Atlanta Brave and LA Dodger)
I literally don’t have even 25% of the time I need every day to do what I want and what must be done to function in society. (If at 72 I don’t function in society, they will take me away and put me in a home.) I am not one of those persons spoken of in the semi-famous quote, “Millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do on a Sunday afternoon.” In any one moment I can plan four days’ worth of things to do in the next four hours. This means I’m always under a bit of tension because everywhere I look I see things I “want” to do but haven’t touched (or even begun) in the four years since the idea first occurred…or six…or twelve…or longer. Life’s mundane ways are interfering with my life.
There’s supposedly a Turkish saying, “No matter how far down the path you’ve traveled, if you discover it’s the wrong one, turn back.” I read it one day in my Franklin Planner, sometime between 1997-2001. It’s resonated for the decades since, but it’s losing its impact now that I’m over 70. There are a few paths that cannot be retraced at this age. I would still be recovering that lost distance when I moved to ‘the home’ preparatory to dying. Example: I’ve purchased houses poorly throughout my life, fixating on what would make it closer to perfect but not realizing I was not capable of doing those things. The house we live in now is almost certainly the last one. We set out to get a house with the master bedroom on the main floor along with laundry facilities. The overarching premise was to avoid stairs. We achieved the stated goal: bedroom and laundry are on the main floor. But the house has a basement which now holds our freezer, the beer fridge, my office, the library/study, and a rec room. In short, I spend large chunks of every day downstairs, and I need to go up and down those stairs every time I want a beer, need to get something out of the freezer, need to do anything on my computer, or heck, empty a cat box.
Yet since I was a teenager I’ve dreamed of a one-story Spanish-style house which from above would look like a capital U. The base of the U would house the common rooms, one wing would hold the master bedroom suite and personal office/hobby space (plus laundry services), and the third wing would house spare bedrooms. I have never come close to purchasing such a home in the fifty years since I thought of it.
And that’s just one! I guess I have regrets or at least questions, all of them related to what were you thinking?
In a book I read about being a Philadelphia sports fan, there’s a quote which explains them quite well. I’ve lost the book and can’t quite remember the title, but the quote goes something like this:
In Philadelphia the glass is not only half empty, it’s got a cigarette butt in it and a lipstick stain on the rim.
Cheers, everyone!
