I woke up this morning with the remnant of a dream in my head. I had gone to Canada with the dog Filbrix and wasn’t allowed in because I didn’t have a passport. There was another problem. Without a passport to get into Canada, I was somehow excluded from going back to the United States. Well, that bullet was dodged when a former college roommate came by and allowed me back into the states riding on his coattails.

When I woke up, it was with the realization that the roommate had been gone for the better part of twenty years. From what I could gather, he took his own life. Typical for him. What I’ve wondered in the years since is whether or not someone got a last visit from him as he once told us he would like to make his visit.

He envisioned having an “Enemies List,” one which would be rated and updated constantly until the day he died. He was to stipulate in his will that the person at the top of his enemies list would get that last visit. The executor of his estate would show up at that enemy’s home, spread his ashes in the middle of the living room floor, declare “He would have wanted it that way,” and leave.

I’ve mentioned my former roommate’s wish to others over the past several years, mindful of what chaos the move would make. I’ve briefly considered doing the same myself.

What stuck in my head, and was made clearer a short time later, was the old saw that life is short and not to be wasted. Or, better than that, getting old is a luxury not everyone has.

Scrolling through Twitter later this morning, I encountered a re-post of a woman’s decision to post nude photos of herself on one platform or another. Her rationale was that she had paid her dues and was finally proud of her body now that she was in her mid-fifties. She had a word or two to say beyond that to the extent that because she was in her mid-fifties, she had been scolded for posting her photo because of her age. She was told that after about the age of thirty, no one would be interested in seeing her in her birthday suit. Her position was that one should look beyond calendar years; that no one should have to be faced with a cut-off when it came to appreciating their body.

What she said is another way of saying that getting old is a luxury not everyone has.

In that past year, I have been afforded that luxury while others have had it taken away from them. I was lucky enough to have had a cancer found and exorcised from my body before it could get a toehold and make my life a living hell – presuming that the toehold took and had migrated to another part of my body.

My stepdaughter’s fiancee wasn’t as lucky. He had a tumor which had migrated to his head from his esophagus. In a matter of about two months from the time the tumors were discovered, he was gone. To say the least, my stepdaughter was (and still is) devastated.

Like my roommate, he was robbed of attaining his fiftieth birthday.

Getting old is a luxury not everyone has.

I look in the mirror and I see someone who needs to lose another thirty or forty pounds. I see someone who bears the visible scars of having been under the knife four times, as well as other bumps and bruises accumulated over the years (a fifth scar has been seen only by the doctor who put it there). I’m told that I will likely need cataract surgery sometime within the next five years. I’m not as strong as I used to be, leading to frustration at not being able to do certain jobs around the house.

At the same time, though, I still have the ability to laugh, love, and live. I may not be the richest person in the world, but I certainly appreciate having the luxury of growing old!

Be Seeing You!

In preparation of my daughter’s thirty-third birthday, I went into the “Dad Drawer.”

The Dad Drawer, as I understand it, is common among most men of my acquaintance. In it, you will find many of the hidden (and for good reason) dregs and vestiges which define a man. The first Dad Drawer I remember belonged to my own father. It was the top drawer of a chest of drawers in my parents’ bedroom. There was no organization in that drawer, except in my father’s mind. What I recall most was finding several chanter reeds (for the bagpipes he almost never owned) and a pair of cat skulls.

Yes, cat skulls.

As I understand it, back in the day, when it came time to learn disection, cats were used instead of frogs, or even lesser creatures. Somehow, Dad managed to score a pair of cat’s skulls from a disection class. They complemented the plastic human skull kept on top of the chest of drawers for just about ever.

Anyway, one of the people in my EFM class sent me an email stating that she was headed over to Savannah Georgia and wondered if I wanted to send something to her.

Initially, I was going to send her the cans of cat food we had left when our cat (Morticia – High Priestess of the Underworld) decided to slither out the front door and didn’t come back.

Too impractical.

I finally hit upon sending her a commemorative ball cap. No big deal for me as I could never wear those “One size fits all” caps due to an outsized head. There was also a button I wanted to send her commemorating the same event. The button was in my Dad Drawer. In finding that button, I spent an hour doing a semi-serious inventory of the dregs and vestigas I had collected over the course of, well, shall we say, several years.

There were pictures. Lots of pictures, ranging from my high school portrait for the yearbook, through my oil patch days, and continuing through a portion of my first marriage. I found several pictures of my daughter (including the enclosed shot where she has me by my hair) at a very young age, as well as a photo or two of my son. The kids’ pictures include at least one set of each child when they were in elementary school.

I had a small collection of buttons of all sorts, including a button of Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau promoting the Return of the Pink Panther; several buttons made as souveniers for a couple of Episcopal Cursillos I attended thirty or so years ago, a button advertising a radio station in Columbus; several buttons from the days I worked for Sears (reminding customers to use their Sears credit cards; and at least one button declaring that I am not understood.

Two funeral notices were included in the mess, as well as a birth announcement of the son of a man I worked with back in the oil field days. The baby would be closing in on his 40th birthday… turned 37 last month. Another envelope contained a letter written to me by my paternal grandfather when he lived here in the DFW Metromess over sixty years ago. I noted that my Dad Drawer was in a chest of drawers my paternal grandfather purchased when he lived here, with stops in Virginia and Ohio before coming back here to Texas to roost.

There was artwork done by both of my children. A pencil box. Several old pairs of glasses. A salesman’s notebook like I used to carry. A photocopy of a magazine article about a car first made up the street from a place I used to live. A golf ball or two. Wires and electrical adaptors for electrical gadgets long gone from my life (hey, they may come in handy someday). And there were more than an ample number of mementoes from a lifetime of accumulation of life’s little treasures.

I found a few things which would properly entertain and amaze my daughter when the hat arrives in Savannah this weekend or early next week. Hopefully she will be amazed at the selection and perhaps decided to start a drawer filled with mementoes of her own.

Happy Birthday, Sarah. Here’s to many more with the memories which go along with them.

Be Seeing You!

I spent a good portion of my day farting around with photos I’ve been taking over the years. If one would visit my house, I would be more than happy to show off some of my work on what I call my “Photo Wall” in our living room. Not to brag, but I have some pretty nifty pics up there. Makes me wonder what if I had some real professional equipment back, say, when I was trying to decide what to do with my life all those many (too many) moons ago. If I would have had the equipment, I could have experimented some to find our what I was capable of doing… in fact, with 20/20 hindsight, I should have done things differently. Life may have taken me down a different road than the one I took. But there are no do-overs.

Part of what happened is that the passion I had for photography back in the day was superseded by a passion to use what people kept telling me was my radio voice.

My father introduced me to the art of photography while I was still in elementary school. He had a photo lab at work where he taught me the basics of developing black and white film. Developing film was one magic trick he was more than happy to show how it was done. When I was in high school, the neighbor across the street had a darkroom in his basement where he was more than happy to show me how it was done. He later snagged a job as photographer for the school’s newspaper and yearbook, recommending me to be his assistant. I got the job my senior year, the year after the neighbor went on to college.

I was lucky. I had some basic training on how to take candid shots and was able to figure out other basics to the art. When I left high school, photography was left behind. I had other fish to fry.

It wasn’t until about ten years after high school that I started to fart around with a camera again. I had no darkroom available to me other than an uncle’s color darkroom in the back of his garage. I was never able to connect with him at a time when he was actually developing film and making prints, so, I lost out on an opportunity to learn how to use a color darkroom.

My photographic experience was limited to whatever budget I had to go to the drug store to have them develop and double print whatever was in my camera at the time. My budget led to several rolls of film which sat in a drawer somewhere, even decades at a time before being processed.

When digital photography came along, I got on the bandwagon – providing the now former spouse with a camera with a famous name (which she almost immediately complained about for not being exactly what she wanted). A few years and a new spouse later, I finally got a digital camera with a look and a feel like the single-lens-reflex cameras I had been using for years.

The nice thing about having a digital camera is that I can shoot as much as I want without having to worry about wasting film. For a few bucks, I have a chip which will hold thousands of photos. What’s more, using the computer, I can manipulate an image in several different ways, making the photos on my photo walls a little more special.

Such a deal.

What’s an even better deal is that I can post some of the photos I’ve taken onto social media, where my “farting around” has earned me compliments and bunches of “thumbs ups.” I might have done quite well had I pursued my passion for creating great photos as a vocation. Some of the elements to do so were present when I got out of high school – elements I might have done quite well with, had I pursued the passion.

But I didn’t. Water under the bridge. But I sure am enjoying it now!

Be Seeing You!