When the Sun Doesn't Shine

When the sun doesn’t shine and the sky is gray and snow blows across the road, I lose my ambition to do things like write and submit a newspaper article.  I have had two readers tell me they look for it each week, so I’ll plod on to satisfy their curiosity.  It so happens as I write this, it is the occasion of my 77th birthday.  Since I love a good metaphor, I’ll offer this one: “If you lit 77 candles on my birthday cake, it would look like a prairie fire.”  As the years accumulate, my standard remark is I’m still vertical.  To be realistic, I am thankful to still be standing and celebrating birthdays.

Hunter S. Thompson earned quite a reputation as a journalist living on the edge of sanity and reality, but he wrote some memorable pieces, one of them included this quote,  “Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming "Wow! What a Ride!”  That philosophy carried through to his last rites when his cremated ashes were loaded into a cannon and shot into the mountain air of Colorado.

The escapades in my life never equalled Hunter Thompson’s, but sometimes I’d wake in the morning and wonder why I did that and made myself look foolish or why did I say that and ruin a friendship or why didn’t I help someone who desperately could’ve used it.  As far as arriving in a pretty and well preserved body, it’s not going to happen.  I carry many scars, the most recent being a large cancer lump cut out of my ear.  Please don’t fun of me when you see me wearing a cowboy hat from now on.  The dermatologist told me that baseball caps are good for his business.

Since there is no longer room on a cake for 77 candles, we’re foregoing that tradition this year, but don’t feel sorry for me. I’m getting a blueberry pie!