Immolate

Finding time. It sounds like a pursuit requiring a geeky-looking metal detector and a blue plastic bucket, wandering up and down the beach in flip-flops and a straw hat. I actually have the hat, but my metal detector is in the shop... meaning I haven't bought it yet.

I wish it were that easy, because I could use more of it. Between kids and softball and wives (present and ex) and the job and college and the weekly Pathfinder game and reading, it's a wonder I find time without a metal detector to make a map, much less write a blog, but somehow there's always enough left to squeeze a little more out.

I think about time a lot. How much do I have left? What should I do with it? Remember all the old people you knew when you were a kid? Chances are, they're gone now. How long before we wake up as old people and we're gone the next day? It could be depressing if you had the wrong perspective on it, so I try to not have the wrong perspective.

Some years ago, I stood back and looked at my life and decided that, if I were to die tomorrow, I would not have grounds for complaint. Not that there is anything all that special about what I've done with my life, but I've crowded some really good stuff into it. There was that time that my son and I completely fell out watching the World of Warcraft ROFLMAO video. We still crack up whenever we hear the tune. I also remember when, in his first year playing Little League, he made an unassisted triple play... from the pitcher's mound!

I remember my first car, a '69 Mustang Mach One. Seeing the Stones in the Festhalle in Frankfurt. Meeting my dad in the airport when he came home after two years in Vietnam. Reading Dune the first time in middle school. Playing Tactics II and Tobruk with my best friend. Exploring abandoned missile silos with my mates, five hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle.

The many weekends shearing sheep with my stepfather and his brothers up in Minnesota are now fond memories. Busting up concrete slabs out behind the house where we lived in Alabama. Picking corn for our dinner in the field next to our place in Wisconsin. Cutting oak and ash for firewood with my friend Steve and his son in Omaha. Spending a Saturday building houses for Habitat with my two oldest.

I remember the first time I went down the intermediate slope at the Broadmoore in Colorado Springs. The first time I went down any slope for that matter. It wasn't pretty. The years I spent with my first wife and my buds playing paint ball every Sunday. The six-sided doghouse I made from plans in my head.

I just realized that I could keep going until even the most stalwart readers got bored and wandered off. Just an ordinary life, but at forty-seven I can honestly say I'm past the break-even point. It is staggering, the shear breadth of the memories I've accumulated in a few decades, without really having done anything special.

Some said, life is what happens when you're making other plans. I'm not really suggesting that the plans aren't important. I planned to get a degree and after twenty-five years, I actually pulled it off, but yeah, that wasn't really how I'd planned it. I planned to have a big family, having grown up in a small one, and that happened as well, in spite of changing priorities and relationships.

I'd love to stay and chat some more, but I've got to work tomorrow and oh... look at the time!