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18
Sep
2021
Sunday September 5, 2021
I had my 85th birthday this last week. It’s a new experience for me. I’ve never had an 85th birthday before; I’ll know I’ll never have one again. Obviously.
My 85th birthday made me feel I have crossed some kind of threshold, some invisible Rubicon. I have entered a new phase of my life.
My almost-brother Ralph Milton defines it as the division between the young-old and the old-old.
The young-old are the newly retired. Without employment to tie them down, they’re free to do all those things they always wanted to do.
Almost all books and magazines about aging deal with the young-old, assuring people they can still enjoy life to the fullest.
But that doesn’t apply to the old-old. Their backs hurt too much to play golf. Their fishing buddies have died. They can’t drive. Their children want them to live where someone will look after them.
Categories: Sharp Edges
Tags: birthdays, aging, young-old, old-old
3
Jan
2018
very day, the local TV channel fills a few seconds in its parade of commercials with a speeded-up panorama of downtown Kelowna. Clouds skid by, showers form, daylight darkens into night. On the highway through town, headlights blend into a fluid stream that ebbs and flows like waves on a shore.
When we’re in that stream, we see only the immediate moment. Traffic either hurtles onward, or it goes nowhere.
That’s because we live in the “now”. We know there’s a past, through which we have come. We know there’s a future, which will probably arrive sooner than we want. But generally, we’re aware only of this moment in time.
The charm of historic sites -- like Barkerville or Vernon’s O’Keefe Ranch -- is that they let us see now, what was then.
Categories: Soft Edges
Tags: anniversaries, Time, Isaac Watts, Thomas Hobbes, birthdays