All I want for Christmas...

...is to forget it happened.

I’m a lousy human being, I must be.

I had so little lust for the holidays this month that I don’t deserve to live. Most people enjoy the holidays, even if they don’t have a lot to be grateful for. I don’t have an embarrassment of riches, but I have enough that I should be grateful, yet instead of grateful all I have been is slightly annoyed by the holidays.

My brother has had to adjust to dividing his holiday time between his family and his wife’s family. I don’t have that problem, and for that I should be grateful. My friend Chuck has lamented the pilgrimages she and her husband have made to spend time with both families. I don’t envy that. Nice problem to have, but I don’t envy it.

I have a Christmas Eve tradition I’m less than enamored with. I buy one or two final gifts during the morning, stop by Doug’s house to drop off a cheap gift that either his family – or at least his children – will enjoy, then head to mom’s house so she can go to the earliest Christmas Eve mass available.

I have to be at her house so I can stay with my sister, who gets kicked out of her group home on Christmas Eve so the group home staff can have the night off. I don’t mind doing it, but it seems like it has become a tradition, and while some people love tradition, the thought of making the pilgrimage to mom’s house each Dec. 24 for the next 10 years is not particularly appealing. If the ghost of Christmas future was to visit me tonight and show me I’d be spending my next 10 Christmas Eve’s that way I probably wouldn’t handle the news too well.

I also tend to spend Christmas Eve at mom’s. After dinner I watch TV and go to bed, rather than drive home, only to return in the morning. During this Christmas Eve I had to make an evening journey to the gas station, as I have a bad rear tire that has a slow leak, and since I can’t get it fixed until the 26th I have to fill it a couple of times a day to avoid it going flat. As I drove up University Avenue to a gas station I passed a bar that appeared to be open at 9:30 p.m., which surprised me since 99 percent of bars close on Christmas Eve. I was very tempted to stop in for a few drinks. I could have used them.

I should be grateful that I can count on having dinner on the 24th at mom’s house and spending time on the 25th with my extended family. Some people have to compromise during the holidays, some people don’t have the luxury of going home, wherever home is, and some people don’t have much family to spend the holidays with. One of my former co-workers only has a twin brother to spend the holidays with, so Christmas is a highly pointless time of the year for him. A lot of people would envy my situation.

And why shouldn’t they? Not only did I have family to spend the holidays with, Monica stopped by my mom’s house so we could exchange presents. The fact that I warrant time for her to stop by my mom’s house during her Christmas day travels should be enough to make the day worthwhile. It was definitely the highlight of my day.

So why would I prefer to forget today? In addition to my lack of enthusiasm for Christmas, I crunched my mom’s car.

We gathered at my aunt and uncle’s house. Mom asked if I’d be willing to drive. I accepted, without hesitation, despite the fact that it was snowing and the roads were crappy. I’ve driven through such crap for years, I wasn’t concerned.

We had almost made it to our destination when I slid into the back end of a Jeep Cherokee. We were off the freeway and within a mile of our destination when I pulled into a turn lane. Everything was fine as I slowed down, but when I needed to stop behind the Cherokee, the car wouldn’t stop. We slid right into it. I angled the car a bit so that I crunched the corner of mom’s car. It wasn’t a high-speed crash, but the headlight of her car versus the corner bumper of the Cherokee was hardly a fair fight. Thankfully my aunt and uncle’s Cherokee only has a minor scrape to the bumper. Yeah, that’s right, I rear-ended my relatives.

At the gathering, everybody noted “that’s what insurance is for,” and God knows my mother can afford the insurance deductible, but it’s four weeks before she leaves for two months in Alabama to celebrate her retirement, and now she has to deal with the hassle of getting the front end of her car repaired. Nobody was hurt, but that seems like little consolation tonight. It’s hard to enjoy your evening after a stupid crash like that.

All I wanted was to get through Christmas and move on with life, now I’ll never forget it.

Back in time (unedited)

I’m not part of a blogosphere, but the one blogosphere I’m occasionally tuned into has a new “meme” circulating. (I still don’t understand the how and why of the term meme, even after trying.)

Members of the Wand of Wonder have been tagging each other to write a letter to their 13-year-old selves. I wasn’t tagged, so I’m not going to write that letter, but I did think a lot about what I would write if I could actually deliver a letter to myself way back when. The purpose of the meme seems to be to review your life since age 13, and write about what you’ve learned since that time, usually revealing things that a 13-year-old version of yourself would never expect. I’m looking at the exercise from a far more practical perspective, obviously.

And I’m assuming that if I am writing a letter to myself at age 13, it would be delivered in an envelope. That’s crucial to what I would do.

My letter would explain in careful detail to 13-year-old Fonzie that the letter is coming from Fonzie circa 2007. It would also contain a separate letter stating “do not open until your 21st birthday.” Why?

This is where the “Back to the Future” mythology enters the picture. Knowledge of the future, and changing the course of human events, will alter the future. We learn that over and over in the trilogy.

Let’s say I write a letter to my 13-year-old self, telling young Fonzie about all the good times and bad times that are forthcoming, all the things I did or didn’t do. Chances are that would greatly alter the course of my life, and my life as I know it today would cease to exist. In theory my new life would be better than the one I have now, but there’s no guarantee. That’s a gamble I’d be willing to take, but cautiously.

One Wand of Wonder blogger gave his 13-year-old self stock tips. The right stock tips and other information would easily alter the course of his life, perhaps for the better, but there’s no guarantee.

I’m not saying I wouldn’t want to arm myself with profitable information, but if I had that information at age 13, as soon as I was able to put that information to use, whatever age it turned out to be, my life would change forever. Perhaps I’d go on living the same life for years, never taking the stock tips seriously until some time in my 20s when I realized how valuable the information is.

I wouldn’t want to take the risk that I’d never go to college. That would definitely change my life dramatically.

But if I waited until my 21st birthday to provide young Fonzie key information, I’d likely have made the same choices up until that point, never knowing how the content of the second envelope would change my life.

So why 21? A couple of reasons.

When I turned 21 I still had nearly two years of college to go. My last two years of college were a great experience, but I’d give myself a lot of advice about how to shape my future beyond college.

I was working on the college newspaper during my final two years, preparing for a career in journalism. I wouldn’t tell myself to abandon journalism and the newspaper, but I’d strongly encourage myself to get a second degree in business or something broad like that, and I’m spell out compelling reasons to pursue a career in something other than journalism. I don’t hate what I do, it’s just not rewarding enough at this point in my life to want to do it all over again.

I’d suggest to my younger self that there’s nothing wrong with spending a sixth, or even seventh year in college pursuing another degree. I really enjoyed the last two years of college, and while there’s something to be said for moving on and joining the workforce, if I needed to hang around school for another year, it’d be worth it.

I would also spell out a detailed plan on how I could finance a year or two of college without living like a poor college student. I’d detail a plan of how I could take a marginal amount of money and parlay it into a modest nest egg for a year or two. I’d spell out how I could go to Las Vegas for a week and bet a modest amount of money on a series of sporting events, turning it into more cash than any college student should have.

I’d limit that information, however, giving myself just enough information to build a two-year college nest egg. I’d detail the plan very carefully, provide plenty of cautionary advice and make it clear that there’s a finite amount of information available, and that if I screw it up, I’m stuck living like a poor college student and doing things the old-fashioned way. If I gave myself the keys to success for a lifetime of gambling I am sure the riches of excess would get the best of me at that age, and I’d end up paying a high price.

All of this assumes that my visiting Vegas at the ripe young age of 21 and betting hundreds of dollars on any one sporting event wouldn’t somehow affect the outcome. That’s a risk I’d be willing to take.

I’d also limit how much I could win in my first trip to Vegas because I wouldn’t want to deprive myself of the experiences of working for a living. Jobs suck, bills suck and life is hard, but I know I wouldn’t handle an embarrassment of riches at that age. Today I’d be just fine. At age 21, I’d have one gigantic party, but I wouldn’t trust myself to do the right things.

I wouldn’t limit myself to one trip to Vegas as my lone source of easy income. I’d also provide myself with some investment advice to help make sure as I worked for a living I was setting myself up for a very early retirement.

And I’d probably include one more letter within that second letter. This letter would read “do not open until Dec. 25, 2006.” That letter would contain a few more stock tips and several sporting event results, along with a lot more advice. I figure by 2007 it’d be OK to have a little more info for easy money. Presumably I will have worked hard in life up until that point.

So why not give myself the bonus information in the letter I open on my 21st birthday? If I had that info then I’d always know I could fall back on easy money if all else failed, and perhaps I’d drift through my 20s and 30s haphazardly.

There’s one other reason I’d encourage myself to wait until I’m 21 to open the second letter. Assuming I lived my life the same way while holding the contents of an unknown letter, I’d still end up going to the same college, meeting the same friends and doing the same things I did for the first 21 years of my life. If I never went to college, I’d never meet several people I still count as friends today. I’d risk those friendships by pursuing a different career in my 20s, but I wouldn’t want to sacrifice them outright by changing the course of my life in my teenage years.

But there’s one drawback to that logic. Everyone I count as a friend since graduating college would likely never make my acquaintance. I have several friends through my years in journalism, and although none of them are people I spend a lot of time with socially, I’d never have any of them as friends, I am sure, and that’s a sad thought.

Would it be enough to stop me from sending a care package to a 13-year-old Fonz if actually presented the opportunity? That’s a tough question. If I said no, would that make me a heartless person?

It would have been a lot easier had I simply been tagged and told to play along with the meme, but the easy way isn’t always for the best.

Relatively painful

My mind is working overtime these days, and that’s not necessarily a good thing. I must have one of those trendy attention deficit disorders, because sometimes there’s so much on my mind it makes my head spin.

Perhaps reminiscing about my family dinner from Saturday night will take my mind off bigger and better things. Somehow I doubt it, but writing this is the equivalent of a cheat sheet. When the next family get together rolls around I can look back on this and remember a few of the factoids I gathered at the 2007 Christmas gathering, as well as the excruciating pain of attending one of these events. I exaggerate, slightly. (Mom called me very cynical.)

This is your final warning: entertainment value of this blog may be rather low.

For 17 years my mother’s extended family has held an annual holiday dinner at a restaurant. There’s a committee of about five people who organize it. Not that it takes five people, but when you have five people to organize the date and location, mail out the invites and collect the payments, nobody has to do any real work.

The family comprises my grandfather, his siblings and all their descendants. That’s a lot of people.

My grandfather was one of 13 brothers and sisters, if I remember correctly. (Each year I try to learn something about my heritage, and although I typically do, I’m not learning much, so even after all these years, I know very little.) My grandfather is the only one still alive, that I know. He just turned 80 this fall. He was younger than most of his siblings. I know he had one younger sister, and I think there was another sibling younger than him.

Regardless, he’s the only one left. Amongst the siblings there have been 38 offspring. That’s an average of just less than three children per sibling. When you factor out the brother who was killed during World War II and the sister who was mildly retarded, that ups the average to nearly 3.5 children per sibling.

Grandpa was awfully busy in his lifetime, from the age of 19 to about 37. He and my grandmother, who died five years ago, had 10 children, all of whom are still alive and live in Minnesota. Of the 38 offspring, my grandfather is responsible for more than 25 percent. He was the man!

Four of the 38 offspring have died, I learned, so there are 34 potential cousins in the pool. For my mom, nine of those 34 are her siblings, so that means she has 24 living cousins on grandpa’s side. Oy! I thought having 12 cousins on mom’s side (11 living) was a lot.

My mom actually gets together with some of her cousins periodically, so these folks aren’t foreign to her. But they’re all Greek to me, except for the fact I see them once or twice a year. I’m starting to learn who a few of them are, not that it gets me anywhere.

My grandfather, being younger than most of his siblings, has nieces and nephews who are close to his age. My mom is the oldest of grandpa’s 10 children, so many of her cousins are younger than her, but some are older. And naturally many of these 34 cousins have children and grandchildren, but the offspring don’t seem to attend. A few do each year, but the annual group is primarily a portion of the 34 living cousins and their spouses. I’m not sure, but I think I was the third youngest person in attendance. So why the hell am I there if nobody else is representing the grandchildren? (One of the two who I think was younger than me may have been a great grandchild of the original 13…she had to be.)

I end up sitting around, talking a bit with my aunts and uncles while pretending to remember people I have allegedly met during previous gatherings. I recognize a few people, actually, but don’t ask me to name them. Yet they all know, somehow, that I’m the newspaper reporter.

I deliberately arrived after the social hour so I didn’t have to engage in chit chat. I sat with my mom, one aunt, three cousins and one spouse of one cousin. (I’m not sure which member of the couple was the cousin, but what does it matter?)

Conversation included discussing my Uncle Bill at the next table. Uncle Bill brought a woman he has been dating for a few months. He met her through the internet, and tales of people meeting people through the internet ensued. My mom, curiously, failed to note that it was the very same internet that led her other son back to Minnesota, and eventually the altar.

Somehow I was roped into this conversation, to which I did my best homage to Homer Simpson? “Do they have this internet on computers now?” I did, however, express mild interest in the concept. “If this internet ever catches on, I’m going to have to look into it.” This was the point where mom dubbed me very cynical.

I think the two female cousins that weren’t with a spouse are single, although I’m not sure. At least one of them is, as the female member of the couple at our table asked one of these other two women if she was a cougar, and then asked if she had heard about cougars and proceeded to explain what the term means. There went my appetite for the $34 dinner I had yet to be served.

I did meet Uncle Bill’s new lady friend. She’s nice, and she use to live in my newspaper coverage area, so she knows the local political players and some of the happenings in my stomping ground. I bet we talked for about 15 minutes, the least painful 15 minutes of my night. And it all happened thanks to this fancy intronet people keep talking about.

I think I’ll be busy setting my hair on fire when this holiday dinner rolls around next December.

The best is yet to come

I have a great blog topic, a fabulous one, but it will have to wait for a while. Instead I’ll have to pen a few random thoughts and be satisfied with that for now.

1. On Sunday I stopped at the gas station. As I was pumping gas a car pulled up on the other side of my pump. The driver caught my attention as he exited the vehicle. I didn’t see him, I heard him, and all it took was three words to get my attention: “Suck my balls.”

I leaned over just a bit, as I had to sneak a peek at the driver. When I did, I noticed that there was a woman sitting in the passenger’s seat of the car. I assume he was speaking to her. The tone of his comment wasn’t the least bit jovial. It’s not as if he was saying, “You want to go home, get drunk and have sex? Oh, suck my balls!”

I immediately wondered why this woman was with a guy who spoke to her like that. (I assume she was a wife or girlfriend.) What a way to live. I don’t know much about domestic abuse, but I know that in some cases it’s not that easy to get out of an abusive relationship, for one reason or another. Or perhaps she was perfectly happy with her relationship, what do I know?

Immediately after the dude was done telling, presumably, the woman to suck his balls, I heard him say something like, “If you f---ing touch that I will kill you.” Was he talking to the woman? Nope, he had opened the back door of the car. A young girl, probably 3 or 4, emerged from the car and must have spotted something on the ground that aroused her curiosity. So she was impolitely warned not to touch it. That made me sad.

This young girl was quite use to such treatment, evidently. She didn’t seem phased by the threatening tone, she simply responded by asking a question.

I couldn’t help but wonder, in retrospect, which will happen first: she’ll be pregnant; she’ll develop a drug problem, she’ll end up in juvenile detention. I can’t imagine this poor girl is going to grow up to be a successful, happy high school graduate.

Perhaps I’m overreacting, but I don’t think so.

2. My cousin was showing some of her jewelry in an arts show earlier this evening. The show features artistic items of all sorts, from pictures and paintings to pottery and jewelry. My cousin has been a jewelry designer for several years, so it wasn’t a surprise she was showing a few pieces of her work.

What surprised me is the fact that she teaches a jewelry design class at the arts center that hosted this show/sale. It’s not surprising that she teaches her skill, what surprised me is that she has been teaching at the arts center for six years. She teaches one night a week, it’s not her regular job, but somehow I never had a clue.

It makes me wonder if I’m really that out of the loop regarding my extended family or if it’s simply dumb luck that the topic never came up in any conversation I’ve been a part of. Or perhaps I knew this once, and I’m simply a victim of my bad memory.

Whatever the case, I have to believe several of my relatives were invited to the show. I’m not on a short list of relatives to invite, that much I know. And although I wasn’t there for a majority of the show, I was there for a while, and as far as I know I was one of two relatives who made an appearance. The other was my uncle, my cousin’s father.

A Thursday night arts show in the far west metro isn’t the easiest thing for everyone to squeeze into their schedule, but I managed to do so. Not bad for a guy who gets a bum rap for not being more involved with his family.

3. Two weeks ago tonight I was sick. Since then I have been congested. It has been worse, not better, in the past few days, so I went to see the doctor today. He determined I have a sinus infection. I’m not sure I’ve ever had one, at least not one that has been diagnosed. Now I get to take amoxicillin for 10 days.

I was highly unimpressed with the service from the pharmacy of my local Target. I don’t think I’m going back there for my next prescription, but they put my pills in the cutest little red bottle. And at least I had an excuse to buy more bottles of 9-cent mustard!

4. I’m having another bonfire on Friday night. It’ll be me, Doug and perhaps one of his friends I’ve never met. It’s not a social event, it’s just an excuse to enjoy a crisp autumn evening, a few drinks and burn a few more cards and letters from my past. At the rate I’m going I’ll be having a bonfire every weekend for the next six months before I finally sort through all my stuff.

I may be slow, but I know that once the ball gets rolling, that fire is going to burn out of control.

And I like it

I'm not going to start posting links to cheesy 80s songs, but I can't stop listening to this song at work.

The bonfire of my vanity

So on Saturday afternoon I had a bonfire.

I had the bonfire for a few reasons. Initially it was intended to be a ritualistic burning of the past 30-plus years of my life. I’m not going to burn everything I own, but I have to get rid of stuff, stuff that I don’t need, and more importantly, I don’t want.

But I can’t burn it all. I have far too many baseball cards to just throw away, even if collectively they’re not worth a hell of a lot. But I couldn’t care less about 99 percent of them. If I kept just a few cards from the entire collection, I’d be happy. The same goes for the years worth of comic books I collected.

Collecting baseball cards and comic books kept me from developing a teenage drug habit, I argue, but in the end all I have is a lot of dead weight I’ve been hauling around for years. I’m not going to burn my collections, but I’m going to find a way to get rid of them this winter, one way or another.

As a kid I loved collecting crap. As an adult I hate it. I’d love nothing more than to have a lot of space and a lot of disposable income to collect all sorts of cool stuff, but I don’t have either, so perhaps that’s part of the reason I lost a lot of my appetite for collecting. I’m not the same person I was as a teenager. Hell, I’m not the same person I was five years ago, for better or for worse. (I’d like to think I’m on a road for the better, but the jury is still out.)

There are a lot of things I don’t need any more. I have several shoe boxes full of old cards and letters. Somehow I was convinced I couldn’t throw away those generic birthday cards my relatives signed on an annual basis. There was sentiment in them, after all. But somewhere along the line I realized that the burden of keeping generic Christmas cards outweighed, literally, the sentiment behind them. It was time to move on. I’m living for the future, not the past, after all. I can’t hold onto everything from my past, otherwise I’ll be burdened with it in the future.

Some day I may be old and tired, longing for memories of my youth, wishing I had held onto all those cards and letters, all the comic books of my youth. But I hope that day never comes. I hope I’ll be able to keep making memories rather than be relegated to living through them. Sure it’s nice to look back at pictures of friends and family, but I don’t need pictures to remind me of my adventures bicycling the MS 150, I need the energy to keep doing it year after year. And if the day comes that I cannot bicycle 150 miles during the second weekend of June then I hope I’ll be doing other things to enjoy life, not sitting around reminiscing about what I did in my youth.

Although I didn’t sort through all of the old shoe boxes prior to the bonfire, I sorted through about half of the collection. I kept a small stack of correspondence from my closest friends, including my childhood friend in Indiana, whom I hear from once a year. I ditched short notes from my grandmother in Chicago, including one with a racist comment in it. (Grandma spent her entire life on the south side of Chicago, long before there were “civil rights.”) I got rid of almost every birthday/holiday card I was given. I burned letters from grade school and college friends I have completely lost contact with. I burned letters from people I struggled to remember.

I glanced at some, I read a few, I disposed of most of them. In some cases all I had to do was see the return address and I knew it was going right in the burn pile. I read a few of those forgotten missives before they went into the fire, but I had no regret about burning them. I burned cards and letters from the early 1980s, stuff I hadn’t looked at since that time. And what little of it I did look at did little for me. Sure I may have jogged a memory or two by reading all those old cards and letters, but I have plenty of memories as it is. I’m more interested in making new memories, not reliving the memories of the past.

I also burned a few other things that I have been hauling around in boxes for years, but I have a long way to go. I have a collection of newspapers from my first professional job, all 14 months worth. I’m going to go through them some afternoon soon and find the most memorable and amusing articles from that point in my life, clip them out and recycle the scraps.

I have copies of miscellaneous newspapers I have collected from over the years, newspapers from cities around the country. I have newspapers from random states I have visited because I always thought it was cool to compare and contrast the newspapers of yesteryear. It still is, but I no longer have the interest or space to hold onto copies of the Houston Chronicle or the Orlando Sentinel from 10 or 15 years ago. That collection of newspapers, some probably 25 years old, will be offered via Craig’s List to a new owner. Somebody out there will want them, and I’d like to see them find a better home than the recycling bin.

Other things aren’t likely to have any value to anyone else, and will end up in a future bonfire if necessary. I’m not getting rid of everything. I still need my bicycling and camping equipment. I still want my Halloween decorations, even if I didn’t get to use them this year. But it’s time to stop pretending I’m going to play broomball again. It’s time to stop pretending I’m going to really learn how to ice skate. That equipment has to go, one way or another.

It’s hard to let go, but it is harder to hold onto the past.

'Cause yesterday's got nothin' for me, old pictures that I'll always see. Time just fades the pages in my book of memories. – from “Yesterdays” by Guns ‘n’ Roses

So although I didn’t burn as much as I would have liked, I started, symbolically, to sever ties with my past.

But simply having a bonfire to burn a few faded memories wasn’t enough. I had to make it an event of some sort, so I turned the bonfire into a social gathering.

Since my apartment is too small to host a social gathering I took advantage of the bonfire as a way to gather a few friends from the various circles of my life. I’m not sure what inspired me, but I realized that because many of my friends have children it’s not easy to have a social gathering unless the children are involved. So I invited friends with children to join me for an afternoon of gathering around a pile of burning wood, with the occasional memory tossed in for fun.

I had juice boxes, Halloween candy and smores for the kids, a rather simple activity with prizes and a complimentary bottle of mustard for each family. Children ranging from 5 months to 11 years old attended, along with their parents, for a few hours of socializing. The kids created their own fun, thanks to the random stuff they found in my landlord’s vacant lot next to his house, and only one child ended up crying. I think I ended up with 11 children making an appearance that afternoon.

I was busy making smores, helping kids find miniature flying discs hidden in the trees and, occasionally, chatting with the parents. Three hours were over before I knew it.

The event started out as a way to burn off a lot of excess crap I don’t need. It turned out to be a social gathering for several of my friends. As I’ve said before, my friends mean the most to me in this day and age, and I hope that Saturday afternoon’s social gathering will serve as a reminder of that fact as I continue to sift through boxes of crap I haven’t touched in years.

But until then I’m content with the thought I had as I reflected upon the day that was in my crappy old bed late Saturday night: I am a great guy. And obviously humble, too.

58 is enough

Sometimes I think I’d be happy to die at age 58.

Chip and I have talked about this a few times, and neither of us came up with enough reasons why we’d want to live to be 88 years old. (Ironically I once thought I wanted to live to be 107 years old.)

Disease and illness is a part of life for the senior population. Nobody lives to 75 without health problems. If you can get to 58 without cancer or a nasty disease, you’re lucky. What are the odds you will dodge those bullets for another 10 years?

By the time you’re 58 you’ve already been through something, most likely. And even if you’re in good shape, doctors will be probing your prostate and putting you through other uncomfortable tests. At that point it’s only a matter of time.

People can still live healthy, productive lives when they reach 70, but no matter how well you treat your body, old age is going to take its toll. Sure, I’ll still have hair if I’m alive when I’m 77, but I’ll have old man skin, breasts comparable in size to that of a high school girl, although not nearly as perky, and a collection of disposable diapers for those moments when the old man’s body has an involuntary spasm. Ooooh, sign me up for that program!

And let’s be honest, there’s a reason they don’t have strip clubs featuring dancers over 40. You may be old, but if you’re not dead chances are a near-naked 21-year-old at the shopping mall is going to register the last sign of life below the Mason-Dixon Line, not the 75-year-old widow eating prune pudding for dessert at the senior center lunch program.

There’s nothing I want more than to be some cranky old man watching young hotties flaunt their bodies, reminding me my best years are long gone. Chances are I’m not going to be as successful as J. Howard Marshall, so there’s not going to be an Anna Nicole Smith to feed me pureed meals in my old age.

In a perfect world a 58-year-old guy will have a wife to grow old with, enjoy the sunsets with, discuss colonoscopy results with and perhaps visit grandchildren with. Last I checked the world isn’t perfect.

When the last pope, JP2, died he was 84. I was 34 at the time. The thought of another 50 years of life held little appeal to me, especially if my final years are comparable to JP2’s final years. That guy knocked on heaven’s door seemingly every other year, yet repeatedly managed to rebound. I was sure that guy was going to live another five years when he finally cashed in the communion wafers.

But the thought of another 50 years, oy ve! I wasn’t sure I had the energy for another 34 years, let alone 50.

I think it was at that point I determined 58 was a decent age. You start to become an old man, but if you take decent care of yourself, you’ll be OK. David Letterman reminded me of that not so long ago. When I realized he was 60 and looked decent for his age, 58 seemed about right.

If you can dodge a lot of significant health problems by 58, you’ve had a good run, and chances are the odds will catch up with you beyond that point. And if you’ve had more than your share of health issues at that point, chances are you’re not going to be magically healthy beyond that point, so there’s not a lot of reason to hold on.

While I have thought about this far too much, it’s not a self-fulfilling prophecy. I’m not going to take a flying leap off the Golden Gate Bridge on my 59th birthday. It’s not up to me to decide.

While I agree that life is too short, unlike an aging athlete trying to hang on in the 59th minute of his playing career, if I make the most of the time I have on this planet, would I complain if I go out with a little left in the tank? Well no, I’d be dead, how could I?