Tick Tock

I grow old. I see it I feel it. I am somewhat concerned with it. In the past three years I went from being a young man to being middle aged. I like a lot of what has happened. I tell you, I know how to get shit done. Some balls drop, but for the most part I get tons done. The pleasure of accomplishment has displaced the anxiety of insecurity. But time is passing. This commentary - Culture That Makes You Feel Old - got me thinking:
http://www.avclub.com/articles/culture-that-makes-you-feel-old,39572/
Me, I check my age every morning when I look at Wikipedia’s This Day in History (I do this because I teach social studies and I want the kids to see how history is a series of connections and consequences.) The part I notice in the long list of birthdays is the number of people older than me but still alive who have accomplished something significant like writing a book or doing public service worthy of note. Then I look at how many people worthy of a notation on the “Born on this day” list are younger than me are and there because they are celebrities.
I have discovered that I am on the tipping point. More frequently I see the names of people I admire, born after April 27, 1964.

Being There

“Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you’ve imagined. As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler.” Henry David Thoreau

This is what it is all about: going there and being. Someone tipped me off to this blog by a young family cruising the Bahamas in a boat much like Haiku.

http://blog.mailasail.com/seafever

Our lives become so busy, filled with so many essential and critical deadlines, that sometimes it is hard to image how to live life doing something as basic as waking up, eating, playing, sleeping. How can a simple life be fulfilling?

I have learned that when I am able to put aside the societal expectations to live in contact with my environment, that I become engrossed in something deeply satisfying: living. I become aware that although I am just a very small part, I am indeed a part of all that I have met.

Stay tuned: soon I hope to post pictures of my footprints in the sand.

Infected

I know when I was infected with the disease. It was in my sleep when I was a very small child. My father came into my room and put this talisman over my bed. This was the last thing I saw before falling asleep and the first thing when I woke up.

The painting hung in my father’s room when he was a child. Today it hangs in my son’s bedroom.
These things can be tough to identify. But it sure looks like Shamrock V, the only remaining wooden J boat.

In hope that someone reading this can corroborate the ID, my grandfather received the painting as a gift from the widow of Marshall Sheppey, a tycoon from Toledo, Ohio who briefly owned the boat pictured and kept it in Miami. He hired Warren Sheppard to paint this portrait