it's about me after all
No doubt it’ll require pausing now and then for thought, but maybe this’ll be the FYI List blogpost I’ve been thinking to write. Or maybe the mind will wander off again as usual, IDK. Probably wander, eh?
Don’t send me messages on Facebook Messenger: it’s all locked up because of spamming I’ve encountered, so if you write to me on FB Messenger I don’t receive it.
A cloudy day and a pitch black dark predawn are as beautiful as a sunshiny day. Especially here in 7H.
I live with the realization that I know nothing. It’s very freeing.
I find AI online to be a good source of personal medical information: when I Google medical questions AI gives me straight answers instead of “oh, we don’t want to talk about that, after all you are ninety” evasiveness.
I’m my only enemy. Eighteen and nineteen years ago, 2007 through 2008, under the guidance of the VA health service, I lost forty-seven pounds in twelve months, down to my Navy retirement weight at age 42. By continuing to eat wisely (a deck of cards size servings of meat, one potato chip instead of two handsful, no white bread) and exercise faithfully (walking ten thousand steps a day) I kept the weight off for more than two years, and it was a lifesaving help during my heart event October 2010 through January 2011 when I was 75. Then, as always before, I let it creep back on ounce by ounce. To love and accept myself just as I am, the way I am, is an ongoing struggle in futility. I do minimal exercise, max about 3000 steps these days according to my cell phone (which at the moment records 3,748 steps so far today, also a breakfast of a mug of hot & black and a peanut butter fold-over on one slice of Pepperidge Farm’s very thin whole wheat bread instead of sausage, toast, and four eggs over medium); but my mind is on a tray or two of cold, salty oysters very soon, and also on the rare porterhouse steak I intend to order at Longhorn Steakhouse this coming Friday.
I am not the Navy admiral that I, like all new ensigns, once thought and expected to be. A diverging road in my yellow wood, eh?
Other than a random trip out, Sunday to church, Friday to Pruitt, and maybe once a week to Bill’s Grocery Outlet or the new Publix at Sweetwater, I like my/our life totally and no place else but here at 7H, the best place we’ve ever lived.
Every good thing
and every bad thing that has happened to me in life has been a diverging road in my yellow wood, that eventually brought me to 7H with Linda at age 90&c. My second half of life has been extraordinary.
I live with progressive CHF and all its manifestations, with aging heart valves and an aortic aneurysm, with my Furosemide no longer as effective as it once was for helping with fluid retention and weight control, with all the uncertainty of ancient age; but Life is Good this Wednesday morning.
I suffer from the standard old age illusion that I can no longer believe anything the government says (“it’s under control”), that nation and world are falling apart, that I’m fortunate to have lived life when I did, when America was working on getting better and better instead of reverting to a "Great" age of White male supremacy.
What worries does an old man have? forty-some years ago a parishioner bemoaned her worries and asked me what I could possibly have to worry about: I said, I worry about Tass going away to college. She asked, "How old is she?" I said, "She's ten." The parishioner exclaimed, "My God, you're starting a little early, aren't you?" Well - - no. It's never too early. Worries this morning: only son riding motorcycle from NC to KY as I write; daughter in nursing home after ruptured cranial aneurysm, multiple brain surgery, and stroke; daughter soon to board aircraft for overseas flight, daughter/granddaughter planning flight to NYC. I would not wish for an afterlife in which I knew what my loved ones are doing and worry about them.
Recently I failed to see an oncoming car as I drove through an intersection and got honked at. No wonder Linda has decreed “no more new cars for Mr Bubba”
After cancelling my subscription to The New Yorker magazine, I gave in to myself and renewed it anyway.
A few of my life’s heroes: Winston Churchill, Ike Eisenhower, Harry Truman, Jimmy Carter, Fr Tom Byrne, Urban J W Peters, Robert Frost.
With Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken” as my life’s roadmap, I have a few regrets that are none of your business, and many joys that brought me to where I am in life this Wednesday morning.
The Road Not Taken
Robert Frost
1874 – 1963
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
A blessing in life is that I, several Times in the early 1950s, sat in a university auditorium and watched and heard the great man himself read the poem aloud.
RSF&PTL
T90