Americans in Europe

(Intermission)

I need a time-out to catch my breath.

An intermission.

Winter’s coming. I can smell it in the winds flowing down off the Rockies. Time to get ready. Things to do.

I need to work on the woodpile. The grid increasingly relies on windmills fluttering away out there on the treeless High Plains of America. Like fragile dragonflies. Any day we can lose power. We need to be prepared. I’ll be 76 years old next year. I can’t take the cold like I used to.

I need to take care of business. My little bank was gobbled up by a bigger bank. I need to transfer accounts. I need to find my way through an electronic forest… hours on hold waiting for a customer service representative in Indonesia to tell me what to do in a sweet voice in a language that’s barely real.

I need to get dinners ready. We eat survival foods – greens and meat, tubers and the eggs of happy chickens. They take time to prepare. And then there’s the dishes.

Friends from out of town are coming for a visit. Clean the rugs. Polish the floors.

There’s a loose hinge on the door to the storage shed out back… off to Lowe’s through traffic lights and attitudes to find the right part. Don’t forget to pick up some carrots on the way home.

And I’ve been thinking that I should get up to the U.P. (Michigan’s Upper Peninsula) to see my folks. My father is 96. My mother is not far behind. My brothers and sister still live up there like the family has done for generations. But for philosophical reasons, somebody had to take off and I was the oldest.

So much to do.

One of the things over-the-road truckers like to say is that we’ve got miles to go with only just enough time to get there. So, don’t make a mistake. Don’t waste time.

Like an old Pontiac requires gas to go, writing a book of newspaper columns requires time. I can easily spend an entire morning looking for the one true sentence that makes all the complexities perfectly clear and obvious.

When you’re younger you wonder what it will be like to be in your 70s, never imagining there would be too much to do.

Last week, feeling overwhelmed, I realized that I can’t do everything and that I would have to give something up. I decided to quit writing. It was like saying farewell to an old friend. It was very emotional. But the next day, on my way up to the camp to get a load of firewood, I remembered what the old timer told me. “There’s a time to write and a time to write,” he said.

The secret was knowing the difference.

I’ve got a doctor’s appointment this afternoon. So, we’ll see. But for right now we’re in an intermission.



(Update: The doctor said I’m doing good, but maybe try to be a little more careful.)