Life Don't Clickety-Clack Down a Straight-Line Track

Jeez what a week. First Father's Day, then an anniversary as we ticked that much closer to the 50-year mark - if you use my mother’s reckoning anyway : “Here you are almost 20 and still acting like a child!” she once shouted at my sister.(Nan was 12 at the time.)Also we signed our wills AND I said goodbye the eight teens who fill most of my thoughts from September to June. AND, as yesterday’s entry shows, a new person came to live here a while who is not just a person but am actual MD person, a Fellow in Infectious Disease. (“So I have this rash” I see myself saying to over our 6am. coffee mugs.)A few nights ago, when everyone was here celebrating Doc Sarah’s arrival, a call came in to David from our only ‘away’ child, to say that after being gone for five years he was now planning to move back here, get an apartment a few towns over and see what his future looked like from there. When he heard the happy din in the background and learned that the rest of his generational cohort was here, he reportedly said, “Hey what’s the idea, having fun without me!”It got me thinking how all these young ones will be having fun without the two of us one day. Updating your will sure drives that point home. Life goes on, as they say,  but darned if its mysterious ways don’t keep on surprising us.There's a great old Ferron tune, here covered by Sarah Kenvyn. Ferron is talking about the end of a relationship but still. That lyric about how life don't clickety-clack down a straight-line track, it together and it comes apart?  well THAT lyric seems to me to be applicable to quite a bit in this life. Listen to the lovely Ms. Kenvyn here and see if you don't see what I mean. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMpXPqeDH_o]

Ask Any Insect

Here’s a thought for the day: Trees win. The boy who owned this bike parked it and went to war in 1914 and maybe he was one of the 21 million who died during that horrid global conflict. In his book “The History of Everything” Bill Bryson says that that same number died in the Great Influenza Epidemic of 1918, also known as the Spanish Flu and the Swine Flu. The difference: it took four years and the senseless slaughter brought about by trench warfare to kill all the combatants in that conflict. It took the Flu four months. And yet....And yet: the boy went off and the bike leaned waiting for him against the then-young tree. Did the tree come to feel sorry for the bike? Did it extend itself to embrace him, saying “Come I’ve got you now”?  Whatever happened, I take it for a message from the universe: Trees win. Life wins. Ask any insect. Ask any microbe.