A Third Look At Life’s Road

“Youth is a blunder; Manhood a struggle, Old Age a regret.” Benjamin Disraeli, 19th Century British statesman.

My youth was a blunder, as I did not appreciate the value of following God’s direction. Had I done so, I would have been far more peaceful as a medical student. I admired the tranquility of a Christian friend, who, I keep up with to this day, half a century later.

I suppose manhood began once I became a medical examiner in Baltimore. Sure, I struggled. It was a challenge to become drier behind my ears, a daily struggle. I slept well, but but I had an ongoing tension.

Is my old age a regret? No. Thirty-eight years after turning my face towards Jesus, I am at peace. The journey makes more sense and includes more perspective.

I know this: If I have no pivotal problem in my life, if I wait about two weeks, that will change. It’s discouraging, but God softens the blows and blesses me with the serenity required to, usually, sleep through the night

Oh, Those Good Stories

“Be unpredictable, be real, be interesting. Tell a good story” James Dashner, an American writer.

I sure try to be unpredictable. It gets a little harder as I get stodgier with age.

Kristine keeps me being real because, thank God, she recognizes when I’m not.

I think I spend enough time in books and with good people that others find me interesting. Hopefully, that’s the primary reason you’re reading this.

As to telling a good story, I am kind of storied out after three books of memoir and two books of fiction. I have heard it said that if you’ve managed to get through your childhood and you’re a writer you have a whole lot more than, I’ve covered in 400 pages, to draw from. I guess I’ll find out.

Found

My Favorite Age

Those Proposals

Molly Worthen, a history professor at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in her book about the diplomat Charles Hill (It’s getting a bit hilly here) noted as to his writing skill, “Transmitting ideas into words is hard, and people do not like to do it.” Therefore someone performing that task well, “in most cases ends up the default author, the quarterback to whom others start to turn, out of habit, for the play.”

In the last 29 years of my work life, monthly, I needed written proposals to a board in order to take major action. I spent an inordinate amount of time on those memoranda because they were critical to my job.

I learned to appreciate just how difficult writing a proposal could be. It’s no small task in writing fiction, nonfiction or any other written work to keep your audience engaged, enmeshed and willing to read on. For me, persuading them to invest in a costly proposal seemed an even greater task.

It was a challenging task to improve my skills with the written word. Thank God for huge favors, as I did.

Growing

To Be

It’s Lasted

When I met my wife I had begun a new journey. What I didn’t know was that it harkened the end of heart breaking relationships that didn’t last including my brief first marriage of less than a year.

She differed from any woman I had ever known. But was she that different?

It took me years to appreciate that I had gained some maturity and that she had that in abundance. Our ups and downs were just that in the course of almost a half century together, not a prelude to loss.

I remember worrying about the durability of our marriage as we approached our first anniversary, given my short-lived first marriage. Thank God for her love and her patience with my many, many shortcomings. She is such a 🎁.

My Early Childhood

Real Bagels

He Would Have Been 99 on Christmas

He was born on Christmas 1924. It surprised me to read that he was only 5 ft 4. Over the course of his life, Rod Serling was a boxer, a paratrooper, a screenwriter, and a narrator of his own television series.

Rod had written 72 scripts before he found success for his television script on corporations, Patterns which was followed the next year by Requiem For A Heavyweight. Both were award-winning dramas that played well as two of the notable live plays on black and white television during the ’50s. It was the golden age of television drama. Rod hit his stride with a popular science fiction series, The Twilight Zone.

Mr. Serling’s psyche was torn by his time in the service in WWII, which, led to his nightmares, flashbacks and smoking numerous packs of cigarettes per day, dying of a heart attack at only 50 years of age. I still remember my surprise at his premature death in the mid 1970s. He had seemed so full of life.

Weight Loss

Being Twelve

Balance?

“The aim is to balance the terror of being alive with the wonder of being alive.” Carlos Castenada, the late Peruvian American author. 

In 1989, I was held at gunpoint but the trigger was never pulled. In 1992, I was enveloped in the Los Angeles/Rodney King riots but was able to escape unharmed in the midst of burning buildings and heightening violence.

In the 30 years since, I have never been near incidents as violent as the two I confronted in that short three year span. Kristine and I, about eight years ago, experienced the wonder of a night in Montana with the most beautiful star-filled sky we had ever seen. We attended, in 2021, the heart- warming, beautiful, outdoor wedding of my son and daughter-in-law atop a medieval castle in Palma de Mallorca.

Terror and wonder, life on planet earth.