For someone approaching their 69th birth anniversary (in six months), having been run relatively hard and put up wet a few times, veteran of one war, three marriages and countless close encounters, and a dozen or more careers, to say NOTHING of the bales of cannabis, gallons of beer and whisky, and the other drugs I eagerly sought and consumed, this (I think an unbiased observer might remark) is an amazingly un-lined, un-wrinkled, un-scarred, UN-careworn countenance, nest paw?
(There is, I should say, I room we don't enter, wherein hangs a portrait we don't discuss...)
I had the extremely good fortune to be born at a time when my race, gender, family class location and historical moment made it possible for me to do just about whatever I ever wanted to do.
Not that I ever WANTED to do much of anything. I am lazy as paint. Indolence is my life-long avocation
But that same 'fortune'/location that could have propelled me into high echelons of anything I'd cared to work hard at also made it possible for me to simply do whatever came along well enough to get along.
I'm not now wealthy, though I'm not 'poor.' I endured my parents (lord love 'em) long enough to have earned a small inheritance, with Soc. Sec, and a (much diminished, thanks to 2007-09) small stash I put away during the last two decades of my working life when I was steadily and gainfully (and for by far the longest durations) employed as a paid, professional scholar, distorting and distressing the placid certainties of complacent, bourgeois, college kids in two states. I don't think I'll out-live it, ceteris paribus.
But I don't lack for anything I really want, that much, these days. I got a roof over me and Budreaux, food for us, and wheels to get us around (e.g., a trip to the groomer last evening to get nails trimmed). It's not bad...
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