The music plays and it gives me ideas for a better way to relax than to consider ordering packages that come in plain wrap or are discussed in hushed tones.
Some of you might need a liberator to help out with your favorite ways to blow off steam and some might just engage in plain old exercise.
Anything that is healthy and offers a way to go gentle on your mind is worth considering or so some might say.
Hell, I am in a particular state of mind and wandering down paths some fear to tread because the fires that burn might be too hot or because you might come across the other extreme and discover a place as cold as ice.
But after synagogue murders, deaths of friends and other challenges that make you wonder if turning 50 is going to lead to better and brighter places or put you in between a rock and a hard place a man likes me turns his face skywards.
Call it a burning love or a story of two souls if you like or simply call the time the almost middle aged man attacked a windmill.
“They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
How Many Years Do You Get?
The dishwasher broke again and the laptop started to do that thing that makes me want to fling it across the room tonight.
Technically the dishwasher isn’t my responsibility but technicalities don’t always count the way you wish they would which is to say the people who are responsible for fixing it won’t do it when it is convenient for me.
So I’ll watch a YouTube video to see if it matches my suspicion and then I will walk over and curse at it just in case there are any gremlins hiding in there.
Once I am sure they are gone I’ll try pulling it apart and putting it back together again because I am a master of demolition and not so bad at creating things too.
The range is next to the dishwasher and for the moment it is a shelf for the remains of the yahrzheit candle I lit for the old man.
When I tear into the dishwasher I’ll think about him and thank him for making me obsessive about sticking with some problems.
It is a double edged sword this not being able to relax when I get involved in some projects. It means I am good at seeing them through and that I have to be conscientious about what I take on and when.
Don’t know why but a thousand years ago a lady of the manor down the road suggested we might have a future and then qualified it by saying it could never happen until we hit fifty or so.
I think the idea was to use an age that sounded so damn old it made pursuit of an idea impossible and I suppose it raised itself from the depths of consciousness because I have spent time considering what I thought or expected 50 to look like.
What is funny to me is to think about how the age was described and thought of as being a time of being physically diminished but I don’t see this time as being described as decrepit.
Maybe I can’t do exactly as I once could but if you felt my hands upon you there wouldn’t just be an electric shock, but a sense of strength or so I have been told.
That is what happens when you drag your feet upon the carpet.
None of the above addresses the question of how many years we get and the focal point of are we living life as we hope to.
Cue Harvest Moon and sing or dance along with a song many people said had no meaning for what reason I cannot imagine.
Told the little mister I couldn’t say how many years I’d live in Texas and that it would be without question until his sister graduates from high school but that there was reason to believe it could be much longer.
“It is about opportunities, cash and where I can make a living that will allow me to retire. My health is good now, but tomorrow it could be a different story. Maybe it will be better and maybe it will be worse.
Either way I am working on setting things up so that I can dance into the sunset knowing I won’t outlive my cash.”
He nodded his head and asked if I was worried about it and I said yes and no.
“Doing my best to invest, save and prepare. If things go half as well as I hope it will be fine and if they don’t, it will be fine.”
“Dad, both can’t be true.”
“Yes they can. I can’t spend all my time worrying I haven’t done enough or that what I have done won’t work. Have to have some faith and since I have at least 15 more years to go I don’t have to get crazy today. Maybe tomorrow, but not today.”
That is what happens when you work on the blueprints for the future, you search for a better way to relax.
I have a few ideas about how to answer that question, oh yes I do.
