Just A Collection Of Thoughts
Journal Entry: 1/15/18
As I progress into the last quarter of my life, I find that I have more time to answer people’s questions. Questions that use to bother me when asked, for example...”what do you want put on your headstone?” I use to blow that one off. “Who the hell wants to think about that.”
Well that use to be. Now I have the time to answer that question. I have always leaned toward, “I have nothing more to say.” Seems like the “right” last thing to say as you are signing off.
Lately this other thought on that subject has started to creep. If it were today, right now even, I think I would go with, “I always wanted to be a sheep herder!!”
Don’t really know why? Don’t even want to think about that. It’s just a thought, tucked away with other collections of thought.
The other thought I had, was to be cremated and put a pinch of me in these little glass vials on a necklace and have them distributed to everyone at my memorial. Maybe they will feel obligated to hang me around their necks for just a little while. It would be funny to watch and see how they disposed of me on the way home...:)
This whole dilemma would have not come up had it not been for someone referring to me as “ Looking Dapper” the other day. It struck me that I have never been called that before and for good reason. I wasn’t old enough.
It’s an adjective that is applied only to men – never to women – after a certain age. It’s meant as a compliment: your suit was obviously dry-cleaned in the recent past, your shirt was ironed, your hair is combed, you shaved yourself within the past few days.
It’s like that other indication that you have crossed a threshold and are drawing every closer to your appointment with the grim reaper. That’s when you meet someone younger than you and they look at you wide-eyed, with slightly raised eyebrows and declare with a hint of surprise that "you’re looking very well”.
It’s the sort of thing you don’t say to teenagers or to people in middle age. It is reserved for, well, people like me. You are not dead, it means you are not dribbling, you are not lying on a trolley in a corridor. No indeed, you are looking very well.
If I recall, there was even a doll in the 50s called Dapper Dan with his girlfriend Dressy Bessie...?
What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes...
Just thoughts...now off to do my chores here in The Sane Asylum
Photo By: Christopher Bryson
