Daily Bread

[catherine]

Beautiful, WS!!!! You are introducing me to Leonard Cohen and the beauty of his music. Thank you.

WS.. beautiful vignette of your community.

razz.. Leonard Cohen is awesome, and I hope WS doesn't mind if I offer an encore.. one of my favorite Cohen songs

[Rogar]

I could go on, but you last post, WS, and the two Cohen songs were just really nice. My eyes welled up a little. Thank you folks.

[Williamsmith]

Music is an outward extension of our inner selves. In its most basic state, it is a heartbeat. In this form possessed by every living thing with an organic rhythm. And so music has a foundation of language suited to communicate with anyone....whether stranger or aquaintance. It is the gift of creation. There will always be music as long as there is a beating heart and there will always be hope. Music is capable of expressing all the ranges of moods of living things, if only we pause to listen to our hearts.

[razz]

Oh, to have that facility of playing on the spot! Wonderful! Thanks.

[Williamsmith]

My wife checks my emails for me. It’s not because she has some urge to be my secretary. It’s her way of clearing the way for her to delete the unnecessary spam from our lives as quickly as possible. And she knows that if she leaves it up to me, I’ll do it when I get to it and not when it “needs” done.

So she shows me an email from the self appointed grand pub-a of retirees noting the list of attendees at the annual pre Christmas get together. I read the first paragraph of well known former co-workers and blurt our, “There isn’t one of them I’d want to talk to let alone have to listen to how important their lives are even in retirement.” And my wife gives me the, “Im married to a grumpy curmudgeon, look.” You know, it’s the kind of look you get from your beagle when you tell him that soup bone covered with ants isn’t coming into the house with him.

She points out that the list in paragraph two starts out with one of my best golfing and hunting buddies. I acknowledge that it’s true but rightly suggest I can visit him any time I please. Now I’m at the point in my life where I don’t care if I’m liked or not and I certainly don’t want to be recognized and dragged back in time to rehash old investigations and hold court on some exploits I’d rather forget or whose statute of limitations might not have run out.

I suspect she thinks but doesn’t say that if she passes before I do, I will become a hermit who prefers his own company to the company of nearly anyone on earth. And she’s probably right although I’d certainly have a beagle or some such hunting breed to suffer with. I definitely prefer the chickadees and tufted titmouses at my feeder to the blowhards repeating long past heroic adventures of public service with a nod toward fictional accounts of stardom stamping out the crimes of degenerates long gone in their prime.

But I give the wife credit. She knows how to wake up in the morning and greet me with an affectionate “good morning” and then courteously remain quiet for at least an hour thereafter when it’s more likely I can be approached with the suggested daily activities without danger of being ignored. At about that time she can tell me what emails have come in and I can pretend to read them and give her the okay to make them disappear. It’s a system that works for both of us. Kind of like Congress.

[SteveinMN]

I read the first paragraph of well known former co-workers and blurt our, “There isn’t one of them I’d want to talk to let alone have to listen to how important their lives are even in retirement.”

Exactly why I never attended a high school reunion after the first one. I figure the interesting people either couldn't bother to show or doing five to ten for some crime or another. Whoever believes social media is to blame for displaying only cheerful happy lives of achievement has never gone to a class or retiree reunion.

[Tammy]

I didn’t know retiree reunions even existed.

[Williamsmith]

I guess I miss the innocence of being a child. You spend your whole life trying to vanquish the fog of uncertainty about mysteries only to arrive in adulthood wishing you could believe in fantasies again. You plan years after puberty how you are going to flee your hometown and explore the world, only to settle within ten miles of your childhood homestead. As a child your life seems to play out before you like a winding road acrossed an endless desert disappearing into the horizon where earth meets sky and it does not occur to you that the road has an end...somehere out there.

To be unaware of the finite nature of existence in such a joyous playful way...that is how old men wish to look in the mirror at themselves again. Imagining a floor spread with plastic GI Joe figures, gum bands, baseball cards, jacks, monopoly, card games, toy six shooters, bicycles, footballs, wax teeth, Superman masks, comic books and a plate of cookies and milk and carrots on a cold winters eve.

It is how all men end up. Wishing they were boys again. Feeling like the world is offered for the taking yet uncertain of how to get ahold of it, that’s the feeling that isn’t there anymore. You’ve held on tightly and now it is certain the time to let go is so close it’s overwhelming. And yet you know when the time comes, it should be more like just getting out of one car and getting into another. You hope it’s that way. Those who go before you, show you the way. You don’t bother with looking for places to play anymore. That’s okay but the ones left behind still look for you to show up. They might delay the start of the game, hoping with the innocence of a child that you’ll come late. But you don’t. So they reluctantly slowly resume play.

[Teacher Terry]

This time of life is interesting as I wonder how did I get this old? It seems like yesterday my mom was this age and I was 30. Not knowing how much time you have left and when you are young you never wonder about this.

[ApatheticNoMore]

I don't think children think they are going to die soon (and unless they have a horrible disease etc., they aren't) but I remember lying awake worrying about eventual death as a child. And I mentioned it to my mom maybe soon after my dad died, and much to my surprise she did too as a child. So I think it might really be kind of a universal experience in childhood.

I don't know if even in my feelings of greatest powerlessness to change anything in adulthood I have ever felt as powerless as I did as a child though (not about death, we are all pretty powerless over that, but about life). I don't miss that.