I have built another boat

About five years ago, when in my early seventies,
I decided to build a boat. I know, now, that at the time,
I needed to decide whether I was too old.

Not too old to build a boat: just too old.
Somewhere there are human critters that seem
to go on forever, but I am not one of them.
I creak, and leak oil, and keep dropping parts in the street.
"Well," the body mechanic says, "that part just wore out.
We will have to see if we can fix it with glue and baling wire."

"Build the damned boat!", I thought.
"You aren't dead yet."

Today I cam back from a visit to a heart specialist.
Something had been wrong. My Internist thought it was
probably my heart, and advised me to leave well enough alone.
"Nonsense!", I thought. "The doctor doesn't look too good himself."

I have been stress-tested, and heart monitored
while I tried to exhaust myself. The cardiologist ran
my blood through an old hand-cranked separator
and told me the news. "You are fine," he said.
"I do believe we will change some of your medications."

My regular doctor was afraid of what I might learn
if I poked around in my chest too much. "You have had
a good life," he said. "Leave well-enough alone!"

After all these decades, I discovered that even the possibility
that something might be wrong with my heart was scary.
"That damned thing might just stop!", I thought.
"There is not much I can do about that!" And there isn't.

I have just built another boat.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer. We do have an answer. We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...

On Watching a Formerly Sane Man Descend into Abject Religion

If you read the previous post, you know the apparatus, pictured here, is a torture machine. There are ten of them in our house, purportedly to circulate air to dry out all the problems caused by a water leak. We live in Tucson: it has not rained in Tucson since the Gadsden Purchase. A mudslide the size of the one in Washington State could course through our neighborhood and it would be bone-dry and stone-hard before it quit moving. I suspect it is the CIA, and probably the Border Patrol! We are, after all, only about a hundred miles from the border. I fully expect a large suburban assault vehicle to pull up to the house, and for lots of people with UPPER CASE LETTERS on their shirts to interrogate us, and I will have to explain that all the drugs I use come from Walgreens and Total Wine. But it won't work. Our minds are going. We are getting short with each other and, if they promise to turn off the fans, I will confess to having invented the Arab...

SmokeSound

Search This Blog