Sktrbrain asked if I was joking about my comment about feeling as if meetings were readying me for life in the Day Room of an Alzheimer's Nursing Home .... I had just the previous night been in the company of a group of folk who all have worked in my field and they were driving about -- conversationally -- like so many smashed up stock cars in a demolition derby ... hither and yon ... crash ... bam ... wandering off. Not a Second Quarter Player in the mix. Almost no one ever speaking to the point of the meeting. But each taking themselves very seriously ... myself, included.
I've been busy for the past couple of days ... juggling all the details of life in the Fourth Quarter with those matters that remain in my working life ... I work about 3/4 time ... I waltz.
Here, Sktrbrain, are just a few of my scattered thoughts that have dominated my thinking.
One had to do with the Hebrew Bible, the Christian Old Testament. The scholars from two millenia past suggested that there were 613 commandments listed. 248+365 ... for their estimate of the days of the year and the number of bones in the human body ... positives and negatives. I became preoccupied with whether the divine comment to Adam (literally, Earthman) after he screwed up by eating the wrong stuff and diming out his lady (some commentaries say that that was his central sin ... primal sin ... his lack of gratitude for the gift of a partner) was one of those commandments. God tells him: "with the sweat of your brow, you'll eat bread." Was that just a curse or was that a recommendation.
Last night, I was hanging out with a bunch of Fourth Quarter types and one relatively young carttonist ... he couldn't have been more than a year or two older than my oldest son ... maybe 48 or 50 or something. That conversation was scattered, too, but had a quality of "lemme tell you where I've been". There was a sweetness to it .... Towards the end, three couples remained ... married 44, 47 and 50 years, respectively. At least one party to each contract was still working ... actually, all were at least somewhat active. I left that meet feeling hopeful and going back to my morning thought about the value of sweat equity.
As I pulled in front of our home, I looked lovingly at a path that I rebricked (not too well) and a brick planter that I fashioned at the bottom. Blessed are you Animator of the World (Anima Mundi) who still permits me to mix mortar and concrete. Amen.
As one bit of liturgy goes: Listen up to our voices: ... don't toss us out in our dotage; as our strengths wane, don't toss us out!
Long day ahead ... and then the debate. May whoever our president is not toss us out, either. I've just noticed how the carmakers are producing cars that stop on their own before we baby-boomers bash into the cars we're following ... Just in time, I'd say.
So, God tells him: "with the sweat of your brow, you'll eat bread." And I’m thinking: “Was that just a curse or was that a recommendation? … Am I right, people?”
ReplyDelete-- Howard “Jerry Seinfeld” Covitz
Not as funny as the Day Room bit, Howard, but I guess it satisfies. Keep at it! PLAY with it! You’ll be writing for a comedy show in no time! You’re familiar with Last of the Summer Wine, aren’t you? It’ll be like that show meets Seinfeld, but of course not nearly as horrible as that sounds.
Anyway, switching gears, if I may, I came across an interesting quote earlier today by Christopher Hitchens (I'm quite a fan of his...to certain individuals’ chagrin) that, given its subject, made me think of this site, so I thought I'd share it with you. He says, or rather, writes:
"A melancholy lesson of advancing years is the realisation that you cannot make old friends"
An interesting quote, wouldn't you say? A family continues to grow through grandchildren and would it be correct to say grand-nieces and grand-nephews? (Never written those words out before, interestingly). Anyway, my point I'm tryingly trying to make is that family members may go, but they come anew (so to speak) in subsequent generations; old friends, however, go and cannot come anew...or at least it’s a process that certainly takes much longer than nine months. And may I add, it is a trust/love that must be built between oneself and another rather than simply and instantaneously conferred as it is upon a new, freshly swaddled descendant.
Oh, and I hope you don’t take umbrage from that opening gag. I couldn’t resist…it honestly read like a Seinfeld punch-line.