Give It Time

There’s a lot going on these days. Wherever I turn in my life, things are … well, unsettled.

For a value of “unsettled” equivalent to…

Months of contractor delays mean every improvement project on our little brick money-pit drags on, and on, and on. We’re living in half our home and a fraction of our back yard. The country continues to fight the twin battles of factionalism and COVID – nature’s gift of death and misery that keeps on giving. The Relious Right’s affiliation with reality is looser than ever. The left is like a bunch of High School cliques bitterly fighting over which seasonal fashion is most vital to own right now. Efforts to help aging family have ripped the bandages off a suppurating history of best efforts, misunderstandings, and fear. At work, a massive reorganization casts a shadow over every decision. Wise people on my favorite discussion group are talking about life regrets and the end-of-American-civilization-as-we-know-it.

I turned sixty. My birthday massage felt like my carcass was being poked to see if it was still fresh enough to eat. A teenager gave me the kind of pedicure I would expect her to give to a classmate that tortures her at school. I indulged in a little… well, a lot of retail therapy on eBay. Naturally packages arrived with things I never ordered; others went astray. To celebrate we went to a high end steak place because I love their basket of delicious breads and compound butters. We got sour dough bread and something bland and orange that was supposed to be pumpkin butter.

But whining gets boring and one of the BEST things about being older is you have enough life experience to know that Given Time, Things Get Better.

So I spent an hour talking to my best birthday buddy, snuggled with my wife, accumulated a lot of cat hair from my relentlessly affectionate orange tabby, and had a good night’s sleep.

There is still a lot of shit going on everywhere I turn. People who should be old enough to behave like adults, still don’t. There’s still a lot of every-political-animal-for-itself and scapegoating going on.

Oh well. Give it time. Give it time.