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Curves in Life can bring pause, numbness, and questions

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Curves in Life can bring pause, numbness, and questions Last week I received a phone call from one of my close friends in Alaska telling me of the death of another close friend, former co-worker, and camping/fishing buddy.  His name, Stephen Tauriainen, was 54 years young.  A former Marine, Semper Fi, he loved going to the shooting range with friends and family.  There were many camping/fishing trips that Steve, Scott Mesick and I enjoyed during the summer months along with movie nights for the latest action movie.  Steve will be missed by many. Steve This is another sharp curve in life for so many of us who knew Steve.  Sadly, it was several days before anyone knew about his death, as Steve lived alone.  Encountering this curve, I found myself on my laptop trying to make sense of it all.  So far, nothing has really come to me other than a good man is gone.  I have used a saying for a long time now, when people die, they aren’t really dead; they have “gone on ahead, sc
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Life Observation # 204 Frogs

Life Observation # 204       Frogs            I haven’t posted any Life Observations in a long while, almost a year since adding the new blog, Traveling Life’s Highways, posting on that one while I was traveling last year.  During that time on the road I have some new thoughts and observations on life and the human condition so will try to start posting them again here and the https://travelinglifeshighways.com website.  I started posting these observations in 2006 and need to continue. One day two frogs were hopping in and out of a watering hole and accidentally hopped in an extremely deep hole.  They tried to leap out, but to no avail, so they began to yell and croak until other frogs heard them and came to help.  The other frogs looked over into the hole and said the hole was too deep for them to help, but both frogs kept leaping up the sides of the hole.  The other frogs, leaning over the hole and waving their front legs, began to yell to the frogs to just give up and die
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It's almost here!

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It’s Almost Here! Something great is about to happen.  Something wonderful and powerful has been brewing and it is about to reveal.  For the last several months, I have been working on a new project . . . Traveling Life’s Highways, planning and preparing to take to the highways to flood the Internet with good stories about places and people, “Seeing America through the eyes of a veteran.” I have been rebuilding a Coachmen Class C motor home to travel the country and write about the good I find in America! Ice
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It’s Coming!

It’s Coming! Something great is about to happen.  Something wonderful and powerful has been brewing and it is about to reveal. Ice
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Crepe Murder in your neighborhood?

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Crepe Murder in your neighborhood? It’s late March once again, the time when we look forward to spring blooms, the return of songbirds, and a parade of maimed crepe myrtles reduced to stumps by bored guys with saws. Since I returned to the south from Alaska I am amazed how every year the horrid practice of stupidly turning beautiful trees into stumps, but people do it anyway. Why? Because they see work crews doing it to trees around parking lots at the mall.  (One can never go wrong taking gardening cues from the landscape at a Galleria.  Eye roll. ) Or a truer reason is because they see all their neighbors sawing away their crepe myrtles and don’t want to be labeled a “no-cut nut” on Facebook. (Social media can be so cruel.) Those idiots who planted a crepe myrtle that grows 30 feet tall and wide six inches from the front door, shame on you! Crepe murder may never end, but that doesn’t mean we have to accept it.  When you spot a crepe myrtle that has been savagely chopp
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Miss my friend Lewis Grizzard

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It has been awhile since my friend Lewis Grizzard passing, March 20, 1994, and it seems like a lifetime ago that we used to sit at the bar in Harrison’s on Peachtree telling funny stories and sharing our Southern heritage with anyone who would listen.  We joked about our several ex-wives and that became part of his stand-up comedy routine.  I miss my friend, his witty humor, his outlook on Southern life, and I miss having those drinks together with his stepbrother Ludlow Porch (Bobby Hanson) each night laughing the time away.  Much has changed since those times, his passing, and my time in Alaska, but the stories still make me laugh. I am reminded of a story that Lewis used to tell in his concerts years ago, it is the story of an older retired couple and the renewed spirit of youth getting ready for a cruise. I hope you will enjoy: “Mr. Wojciehowicz had been retired for a year when his wife of fifty years suggested one day, "Why don't we take a cruise for a week
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Life Observation # 203 – Time

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Life Observation # 203 – Time The only unit of time that matters is heartbeats.   Even if the world were totally silent, even in a dark room covered in five layers of foam, you’d be able to count your own heartbeats.   When you get on a plane and travel you go 15 heartbeats per mile.   That is, in the time it takes to travel a mile in flight your heart beats 15 times.   On a train your heart might beat 250 times per mile.   And we count this up and we make sense of it.   We’re constantly switching accelerations; we’re jumping between time frames. That’s what they’re asking people to do every time someone makes something new, some new tool or product. Technology has leapt forward so fast companies are asking us to reset our understanding of time and how it affects things.   To accept that the sequence they are asking us to follow is the right way to do a thing. We are only given so many heartbeats; don’t waste any of them on the trivial things that get you riled up or ag
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