So, I suppose you were expecting something about July 4th, nope (I do love my country but I can post about that any old day).  I was thinking about personal independence as we age.  My folks are in their 80s/70s so things are starting to go the way things go for mostly everyone that age.  Over the past year or so their herd has been thinning at an alarming rate.  Various friends lose a husband and then they also walk off into the after not so long after.  My parents (I do not know if it is a generational thing) have close bonds with friends going all the way back to high school… sort of the golden age of USA high school like you would see idolized in the movies…  My father in his ray-bans with a pack of smokes rolled up in his white shirt sleeve… My mother part of one of those clubs The Dungaree Dolls (or something like that, I always screw that up .. but it was literally just like out of the movie Grease) with the matching jackets.   To think what they have seen in their lifetime alone is astounding (and now they have trouble seeing, period).  A whole life’s collection of events, experience and footsteps.. and now even that simple step comes with peril. I used to laugh at those “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” commercials…OK, and I still do… BUT think about the reality of that happening, the helplessness, the sheer realization that you might not be able to take care of yourself anymore… after an entire lifetime of doing so (and raising seemingly ungrateful kids at times).    And I worry about what people might think of my blog ?  Totally moronic in that context… I suppose it is all perspective and I need to carry that around like a reminder, truly.

Slowly but surely life robs you of the simplest of things… your ability to move around freely now that you know more about the world than you surely did 40 years ago.  I can not imagine what a cage that must feel like.  I doubt most of us can even if we can get a handle on it philosophically/empathically.  Only now are some of my razor sharp skills starting to just fail me on occasion… but I imagine this is just how it is… slowly the walls closing in to where you don’t notice until you are bed ridden… wondering what happened.

Just some background on me.  I am adopted.  Somehow when I say that to a bunch of faces there is a reaction like “we didn’t know”, that there should be some crimson letter pulsating on my forehead when in fact being adopted is just something I have always known to be (kudos to my folks for never hiding it, in fact I can only remember that I only ever remember knowing).  The only odd part, I guess, is that the adoption was arranged by my mother’s OBGYN with one of his other clients (in vitro was not an option in the early 70s)… so I was literally born in my hometown (JFK Hospital, Edison NJ)… so… I could have literally run into my “birth” mother at the local Starbucks 1000 times and would have never known.  I assume that it was some young woman out of wedlock who did not want an abortion.  I really don’t know the circumstances.. I honestly never cared.  Note that I did not use the term my “real” mother, because my real mother will always be Beverly Lynn Koblentz, she raised me, she gets the credit (or blame as it were…).

So… what does it all mean?  I don’t honestly know.  I am open for review.  I think we just need to remember we will all be weak at some point.  What do we do about that?  I suppose that is what defines us.  Maybe it doesn’t really mean anything in the long run, because the long run ends the same for all of us.  But if someone finds the document of my life many years from now… I would like to think I did my best even if I failed many times.

“once” 6.15.18

I have to live

I have to thrive

I must

because I am alive

just this once

damn it all

I must

ignite the world

This will be an odd musical choice… but what the hell, I am an odd person in an even world… Screaming Trees “Nearly Lost You”