03-25-2019, 09:20 PM
(03-25-2019, 08:40 PM)Tim Randal Walker Wrote: Now that I have gotten past the initial shock of my Dad's passing, I have begun to sense a void.
In terms of family generations.....
During the first 62 years of my life, there was always at least one older generation. At this point that is only just barely the case. Of my few remaining aunts/uncles, one uncle on my mother's side of family might last another decade-he was the baby of the family.
For my siblings, cousins, and me, soon there will be no older generation.
There are always regrets for me of things that we might have done together but didn't -- had I been more persuasive. That is one time in which some of us encounter anew how imperfect we are.
I hope that I get the opportunity to share life with someone who appreciates what I have to offer. I live only 150 miles away -- and I have never heard a live concert of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. That is still on my bucket list. I was in Chicago on a day that Alfred Brendel was playing the last three piano sonatas of Beethoven -- magnificent works played by a pianist who got the nuances with his analytical style. And I could really kick myself for not seeing Red Skelton when he was in Kalamazoo.
(But at least I had what by many opinions is the best beer in the world. It has a distinctive nutty flavor).
Nobody's wisdom is perfect. And this is not about buying into some growth stock when it was a penny stock and seeing an investment of $75 become 750 grand just before I sold out of it in the summer of 2007, or getting in on the ground floor of a company that put my life in the economic stratosphere.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.