Welcome to Bud’s Blog

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes - Marcel Proust

Sometimes Older Eyes work, too - Bud

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Necessary Definitions

Sage – a wise man; a man of gravity and wisdom; especially, a man venerable for years, and of sound judgment and prudence.

Curmudgeon – an ill-tempered old person full of stubborn ideas or opinions.

Fool – A person with poor judgment or little intelligence; a jester, a person whose role was to entertain a sovereign and the court, often with foolishness.
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I’ve been wondering lately what it would be like to be able to relive my life knowing what I know now. Or if I was able to give my grown children a view of the world through my Older Eyes, would it change their lives? Here’s a provocative proposition: If I could get every twenty-year old to look at the world through sixty-four year old eyes for just a few minutes, it would either change them for the better or kill them. Provocative but probably not true. I doubt there are many young men making bucket lists as a result of watching Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman.

With a do-over unlikely and getting my children to listen to my archaic opinions only slightly less so, I’ll record the view through my Older Eyes here in Bud’s Blog.   As you read each post, you decide … Sage, Curmudgeon, or Fool … we can agree to disagree on which is which. Your comments are welcome, whatever your age.   If what you read changes you for the better, I’d especially like to know.   Hopefully there will be no casualties.   If you are new here and want a taste of my Older Perspective before diving in, The Best of Feeling Older offers a few of my favorite posts on aging.

Resentment

Almost two years ago, Muri and I went to a jazz concert at the Thornton Winery in Temecula, California.  The concert featured my two favorite groups, Acoustic Alchemy and The Rippingtons.  I posted about it back then in Monday Smiles – 10/10/2011 … and in the spirit of Monday Smiles, I talked mostly about the music, complaining only a little about the slightly snooty, somewhat noisy audience.  And I didn’t talk about one particular incident.   We were seated near the edges of the seating area in order to be in the shade, so there were a number of people standing a few rows behind us.   One man, in particular, spent the first twenty minutes of the show talking loudly to his friend.  I waited patiently for someone to ask him to stop, then turned and said, Could you talk a little more quietly, please?  He looked at me and said, What’s the matter?  Can’t you hear the music?   I can hear it, I said, but it’s hard to enjoy it with you talking.   Well, he said, I’m going to just stand here and keep talking to my friend, so turn around and watch the show.  He did … so I fumed on and off for the rest of the concert.   The song that Acoustic Alchemy was playing was at the time was Templemeads, and since that day, every time I hear that song, I find myself searching for the perfect thing I should have said.  Nasty stuff.  That is the definition of a resentment.

Friday Favorites 5/23/2013

This week, I’m reading Christopher Moore’s Sacre Bleu: A Comedy d’Art.  There’s a scene in Sacre Bleu, which is a fictional mystery-comedy about the events surrounding the supposed suicide of Vincent Van Gogh, that gave me the giggles.  Lessard, the baker (who is the book’s main character) and several impressionist artists, including Renoir, Monet and Pissaro are admiring Edouard Manet’s Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe, then titled The Bath:

Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe by Edouard Manet
courtesy Wikipedia

The painting created a sensation when it was first shown in Paris in 1890, and the crowd is pointing and laughing at it.  Lessard, wondering why people are laughing, says, Is it because she’s too skinny?  Renoir adds that I like a girl with a substantial bottom, drawing in the air the size bottom he prefers.  It’s 1890, after all, when

Bright Lights

One of the treasures I saved from my father’s house when he moved to assisted living is a letter my Mom wrote from Casper, WY, where my father was stationed at the Army Air Corps Heavy Bomber Training Unit.  The letter begins, Dear Mother and Dad, This is an extra special important letter so I’ll send it to the two of you  (You’d best sit down, Mom).  It continues, You two have been married too long to be just Mom and Dad.  Don’t you think it’s time you were Grandma and Grampa?  My Mom was telling her parents that she was four and a half months pregnant with me.  Of course, they didn’t know me was me yet, so they’d nicknamed me Stinky, Jr.  Thank goodness that it was Buddy that eventually stuck as my nickname.  The letter says, I hope we do have a boy … with blue eyes and a dimple in its chin … not the other end like me.  Hmm.  I have brown eyes, by the way.   In the letter, my Mom went on to ask if it was OK for her to come home and live with her Mom and Dad while my Dad was shipped overseas to Italy to fight the war.   I’ll have a Pullman all the way home, she said … for free, too.  The Army was paying.  Trains played a big part in my Mom’s travels when she and Dad were first married.   There was even a running family joke that my real Dad was a porter.  All you have to do is see a picture of my Dad and I together and you’ll know the truth.

Swyping and Typing

Here it is, Top Sites Tuesday (#204, by the way, where we offer Two Thoughts on Tuesday), and what I’m thinking about is texting.  And emailing.   And blogging.  And how the way I text and blog and email has changed with technology.   For a guy my age, I text a lot, even though I used to say, Why would I text on my phone when I can call?   It’s good for quickly checking in with someone or for exchanging information when you don’t want to get involved in a lengthy conversation.  Because of the nature of my consulting business, it is also useful to be able to respond to important business emails when I’m away from my computer.  I stuck with Blackberry for years because I preferred a physical keyboard, even if it was Lillputian-sized, but, alas, Blackberry fell farther and farther behind in applications and speed, so I was forced to go to an on-screen keyboard.  I bought a Samsung Galaxy II and found that if I turned off the really annoying autocorrect, I could type faster than I could on my Blackberry.  So Thought Number One is: Old curmudgeon … new trick.  What a concept.

Monday Smiles – 5/20/1944

If you were one of the 65 people who stopped by yesterday, you know that this is my birthday, hence the date in the title.  Yes, 1944.  Sixty-nine years ago, a two-month premature baby boy was born into this world in New Haven, Connecticut, delivered C-section because my mother was suffering from toxemia.  Fortunately, the experience ended well for both of us.  If you’ve been a reader since the beginning of Bud’s Blog, you know that Older Eyes started as a place to talk about Feeling Older as my sixty-fifth birthday approached. The arrival of my Medicare card before my sixty-fifth birthday was traumatic after helping manage my father’s Medicare issues for many years but I was upbeat in my sixty-fifth birthday post, Turning Sixty-Five.  Each year, I’ve posted on my birthday, sometimes a bit cranky, like Sixty-Freakin’ Six.  Last Year it was Fifty-Eighteen, so I guess technically, this year I’m fifty-nineteen.  This  birthday feels like a bit of a non-event but I’m already wondering how it will feel to be sixty-ten.  Yikes.  THAT can wait a year.

Lucky

Four times a year, an occasion comes along when Muri wants to buy me something nice … a present: birthday, Father’s Day, anniversary, Christmas.  Tomorrow, by the way, is my birthday.  We’ll talk about that development on Monday Smiles. Tomorrow.  I’m not easy to buy for.  For someone who doesn’t care all that much about clothes, I’m fussy.  There are certain clothes that look like Bud and I certainly don’t want to be one of those men who look like they were dressed by their wives (translation: wearing clothes that don’t look like Bud).  As I’ve aged, too, I seem to want fewer toys, in spite of being both a techie and somewhat of a geek.  So, Muri and I usually shop together for my gifts or I come up with some electronic gizmo and buy it for her to give to me.  But for a while now, I’ve had trouble coming up with anything I want.   Ah, yes, you might say, the man who has everything … and I certainly do have a lot of things.  But when I wander through Best Buy, I see many of the hot guy-toys that I don’t have: 55-inch flat panel TVs, $1000 tablets, $400 Bluetooth soundbars and super-light ultra books.  This week, I considered a new bike to replace my aging Panasonic.  But a funny thing has happened on the way to 69 … what I have … my old bike … my 36-inch TV … my clunky laptop are enough.  What a concept.

Off

I slept really poorly l last night, waking at least half a dozen times and lying awake a while each time. I don’t remember dreaming but once at 3:30, I awoke with an aching sense that I was alone and unloved, in spite of the fact that the person who loves me most was snoring softly beside me.  Although I consider myself a morning person, when I rolled out of bed a little after eight, I was Off.  Grouchy.  I sat on the loveseat in our bedroom reading the news on my Nexus tablet. When Muri awoke, she had some things to tell me and I tried to be civil but I’m not sure I succeeded. After almost fifty years together, Muri knows me well … she went off to the park by herself.

It is a feature of my personality that I take the sunny mornings when I am, as my Mom used to say, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for granted.  But when I’m Off, there’s a persistent voice in my head that tells me Off will last forever … or at least for the rest of the day. That’s where the advice of my friend, Don, comes in.  Do the Next Indicated Thing, whatever you would have done if you weren’t Off.  A little breakfast … Life cereal and bananas … and a little caffeine took the edge off of Off. A cup of coffee from Mickie Dees and it was safe for me to be around people.  As I pulled up next to Muri at the park, I got a big smile and an, Are you feeling better?  Yes, I said  lying just a bit.  I did my Morning Pages and now, I’m sitting in the park, posting this on my smart phone using the WordPress app.

I’m not Off anymore.  That voice in my head was wrong, as usual.  But next time I wake up Off, I’m sure it will be there telling me the same thing.  And I’ll be doing the Next Indicated Thing … again.