Looking Back
So back in 2017 we took our 30th wedding anniversary trip to Banff.
Strangely enough, I put nothing about that trip in this diary – right then, it seems, I wasn’t blogging much. Of course, I was in my last two months of training for Ironman Arizona, so I was a little distracted.
The whole thing was a surprise to me – Ethel actually arranged it all. A ridiculously fancy hotel on the mountainside, multi-course dinner (to which I wore my tux), sightseeing on a big-wheeled glacier crawler – and a helicopter flight to ogle the Canadian Rockies.
I have the souvenir picture on my desk. Gosh, I was young, fit and trim then.
Of course, this was a lot of fun, and there are a lot of memories attached.
But now I look at this picture and I think – that was nine years ago? What happened to those nine years? Where did they GO?
I can look at my training log – or at this diary – and see the things that happened during those nine years. But somehow, it doesn’t seem like enough stuff to fill up all of those days. And, truth be told, it probably isn’t, since two years later I retired, so a lot less has happened than might have happened had I kept working.
But, still – wow. Nine years. Where does the time go? Nine years now seems like a ridiculously short time.
My next thought, then, is – hey, in nine years, I’ll be seventy six years old. That doesn’t bear thinking about.
So, I won’t.
Okay, this last week was pretty much a full training week, with seven hours on the bike, and three runs. Yesterday, after church, I went skiing, but I didn’t seem to be skiing the way that I normally ski. And then, last night, when I went to the bathroom in the middle of the night, I was almost staggering. My legs were tired and stiff.
This was a Monday, which means that I was supposed to swim. But when I woke up, the legs felt no better. So, I put “Swim?” on my morning list, and – since I was undecided about it – I asked God for “inspiration, an intuitive thought or a decision”, just like it says to do in the book. And then, over and over again, I kept asking Him for the inspiration to swim, if He wanted me to swim.
Apparently, He didn’t. Or I was too lazy to hear Him.
Instead, I finished Tom Clancy’s “The Bear and the Dragon”. I love the way that he writes battle scenes – especially when there are M-1 Abrams in the battles – since, being a tanker, I love how those things never lose. They told us in basic training that we were going to be the first unit ever trained on the ultimate killing machines, but we didn’t know – heck, I don’t know if anybody knew – just what a game changer those tanks were.
Ethel is gone out for another two+ hours of church stuff, all to do with her being the new treasurer. I sorta warned her off of this thing, since it seemed to me that she was already spending enough time at church – but she paid me no never-mind, and now she’s hip deep in the hoopla. It’s amazing how often she’s doing that stuff that was only going to take “two to three hours per month”. Well, maybe it’s just her normal tendency to overdo stuff. I feel sorry for people like that.
So now I’m practicing the piano, incredibly simple stuff that I seem completely incapable of doing to the beat of the metronome. I hear it behind me now, clicking and clicking and calling me back there to face my inadequacy. It’s just one more way that time seems to be defeating me.
Fat Charlie's Diary 