This Late Afternoon
Saturday. Sitting on a bench beside the lake thinking this drinking of sake in the evening can't continue, but thinking in a broader sense the sake is just a symptom of not having come to grips with this retirement thing. What was I saying when I got out of school? “What now, pray tell?” Was that my question this morning on the bench? Yes, I believe it was. When I got out of the army I had no better answers, but I tried a couple of things: spent a decade or three playing at doing the things other people seemed so serious about and now, older than Egypt, I am again starting out, asking the same dumb question.
Well, if it's been sixty-five years asking the same question what's so special about sixty-five?
Now that I've retired I appear to have quite a bit of time to consider options.
So you've got time, but you've had time sitting around like this before, not to mention those four years you took to write a book in your thirties. Most people would consider writing four hours a day not working at all.
Four hours a day including weekends! I should never have written on the weekends, though. Next life it's four hours in the morning, Monday through Friday. Weekends you clear the brain by fooling around.
So what now?
Well, a couple of thoughts walking home from breakfast. The women in black are being counter picketed by a local group taking them to task on what I assume is a position they're not liking on Israel and so they've been facing off against them on separate sides of the street on Saturdays in front of the Grand Lake theater. And, of course, I've taken photographs. I should take more and much better photographs. I should also find out why they're arguing and I suspect I would if the Middle East weren't so depressing and the options so dire. Then again the farmer's market held on Saturdays would make for an interesting study, less divisive, fewer chances of losing women friends who've lived in Israel.
That's a little more upbeat. Not something that's really talking to you, but the sort of thing photographers are supposed to do.
Yeah, I think this hangover is about done. The day seems better, the air crisp in this late afternoon.
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