I was corresponding with a friend of mine whom I hadn't talked with for quite some time. She had asked me what I was up to these days and I told her about some projects that I was currently working on, even though there are still some other dreams waiting in the wings. I had actually ended my employment (so-called "retirement") for the purpose of those waiting dreams, but the reality was that these projects I told her about were also important to me and somehow had intruded
One of the projects I told her about was organizing three generations of family photographs that I had promised my siblings I would do for the four of us. The photo albums were quite thrashed and anyway, nothing that could be easily divided up into four parts, so I envisioned compiling Shutterly books, one for each generation, and then having volumes printed of each one for the four of us siblings. There was no reason to have hundreds of baby pictures of me, for example, so this compilation would be more efficient and reasonable.
My friend wrote back that she very much wanted to put into order all her photos, as well, but that would have to wait for when she retired, which I take will not be very soon. Understanding her situation, I wrote back that it was because I, like her, had worked so much before that I just didn't have the time then to do all that I am attempting to do now. I had been thinking that somehow I hadn't parceled out the various obligations or aspects of my life very well, but then I realized that hindsight is 20/20, so it is silly for me to think of what I should have done...I just need to deal with it all now and be grateful for whatever other things I had done in those previous years.
I am in pretty good health, actually, and more or less tell myself that I could have (maybe) 30 more years (just as a nice easy round number). But it is sad that there actually are people around my age who are in nursing homes. So while I keep my eye on the idea of 30 more years, I can't do what was a mistake in my previous thinking, and that is a sense that I felt like I could live forever. Now with a dream of 30 more years, which means I could do a whole lot (just think back in your own life to see what you were doing 30 years ago and realize how much you really could have post your retirement age), I don't want much of this remaining time to just slip away. Maybe there was a silver lining in the Covid situation (her in Los Angeles we are still in LockDown), where it has caused many people to reevaluate what things are meaningful in their life and which things aren't as important.
We've sort of taken a great big "time out" for reavaluation...or at least that has been my own situation. Waking up very early in my bed for what seems like many months, I have been lying there with my eyes still closed and writing in my head my whole autobiography (I wish I had written all that down!) and it has been pretty enlightening. I think "Know Thyself" Socrates would have been impressed. Maybe it was due to all that that I finally got into the photograph organizing. Suddenly, all those people, and all those years, had special meaning to me, more than ever before.
He's a story that seems germane to this particular subject. I was on a Caribbean cruse out of Miami, on an almost brand new ship at that time, the MSC Seaside (gorgeous beyond belief, and this time I even had a balcony cabin!). Travelling alone as I so often do, I talk with everybody and it seems that many people do like it when I do…I often make friends all over the ship, at least for the duration of the cruise, which is often a little mystical “time out” from normal life.
So one day on the cruise, I walked into my favorite lounge out of the many that were onboard, it had a combo from Brazil and I love Brazilian music, so I had come in to enjoy the music. But first, I walked over to the bar to order a drink, and I saw a woman and a man sitting there at the bar drinking martinis. I walked over to them and said, “I see you sitting there enjoying martinis. I am 71 years old and all my life I thought I HATED martinis.” I explained to them that one weekend, Jeannie and I, a good friend of mine (a really wonderful person who became a great success in her life) and I were sitting on my bed in our dorm and our goal was to figure out the recipe for a martini. “I said to Jeannie, ‘It shouldn’t be all that complicated, it is only a mixture of gin and vermouth’. But no way could we manage a recipe that we could stand. He kept trying various quantities of vermouth in the gin, but no matter how much vermouth we put in it, it just kept getting worse and worse. Finally, before we got too drunk, we decided to hang it up, deciding that we simply didn’t like martinis no matter what the formula was. And I had held onto that belief for about 50 years!”
“However, only a few weeks prior to this cruise, I was thinking about various standard cocktails and how peculiar it was that one of the most popular ones, maybe even the most popular one, was one that I hated. And maybe that was my fault. After all, I didn’t really know the actual formula. So finally I did the reasonable thing that I should have done five decades ago, just looked up the recipe in a bar book!”
“And well, I saw what had been the mistake that Jeannie and I had made…we had started out putting in a little TOO MUCH vermouth, and all we did was compound that mistake until we had given up! The correct recipe called for 3 ounces of gin and only ½ ounce of dry vermouth, and two pimiento-stuffed olives. So I made that recipe at home and it was delicious! Go Lord, all these years later…. Well, better late than never!”
At this point, the woman sitting at the bar said, “No, the best martini is no vermouth, just add in the olive brine! But I LOVE your story, why don’t you join us and get a martini…made the correct way?”
So of coarse I joined them! I liked the woman’s recipe perfectly fine, and so we began talking about all sorts of things and I told them some stories from my life and they told me some from theirs. This went on for an hour or two and it only stopped because it was near time for them to go to the evening’s show--they had tickets for the first of three shows--those were spectacular on that ship. My own ticket was for after dinner, the third show of the evening.
They said they really enjoyed talking with me and they both said that I definitely had to write a book and, of course, I agree with them (and have been told that a hundred and eighty thousand times), which is also one of the projects that I am attempting to finally work on. But before they got up and left, they revealed that they were from Switzerland and both of them were physicians, and both of them were 100 years old.
I was nearly blown over…I honestly hadn’t had a clue that they each were a day over, well, I don’t know, they just seemed “timeless”, not of any age. There they were having a ball with their martinis on this cruise and most people feel that they wouldn’t even be alive by then and certainly wouldn’t be gallavanting around the globe! They were extremely inspiring just in whom they were. So I like to keep a mental grip on an example like them; that can be me, and it can be you!
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