Somehow or another, 78 years has just crept up on me. I tend
to think I am too young to be this old, but here I am.

What in the world happened?

One year I was in elementary school, enjoying recess, square
dancing and  BAM..the next thing I know I
am having to try and decide which Medicare plan I want to choose, or do I want
cremation or burial?

Making a decision when you are 12 years old is much easier
than when you are about to hit the big 80.

For one thing, there wasn’t a heck of a lot to choose from
when I was 12. Did I want to go to the movies or not? What kind of candy did I
want to eat when I got there? Do I want to watch ABC, CBS or NBC?

Now I’ve got 346 different Medicare plans to choose from, I
can’t eat candy any longer and I cannot begin to guess how many channels,
movies and television series are being beamed into our home. Too many for me to
count, that’s for sure.

I’ve got HuLu, Netflix, Amazon, IMDB, Roku and Google. I
still can’t find anything worthwhile to watch. I seem to spend the majority of
my time looking at the seven or eight-word description of some 2-hour movie.

“Death at The Doctor’s Door” a gripping hilarious musical tale
of murder and comedy.

So we click to see what it’s about and for about 1 and ½
hours we keep thinking, no praying that this has to have a story and will get
better, but it doesn’t, does it? Then we end up feeling guilty that we wasted 2
hours of our lives eating too much popcorn instead of watching something
worthwhile like televised wrestling, or the Discovery channel’s gripping
24-part series about penguin mating habits.

Reading movie reviews at our age is totally worthless. The
critics of today think a romantic comedy is when the 1,000-year-old mutant
alien vampire only rips off the heads of 1 or 2 of the town’s most promising
Olympic cheerleaders/skiers/scholars/rock stars or potential politicians. That
last one kind of caught my interest, but I will move along. HAHAHA.

Our kids (not really kids anymore, youngest is 44) think we
have too much clutter. Well, after 50 years of marriage and raising children,
grandchildren, great grandchildren and dogs, we have accumulated a lot of
stuff. I wish the boys would come and get their trophies and high school papers
and all the rest of the junk they refuse to keep at their houses. Trust me,
it’s hard to throw out stuff they made when they were 7 or 8 years old. It’s
hard to toss birthday cards or letters and notes away. You search your soul
trying to find the right time to chunk these treasures into the can. It’s like
when I have an old American flag or a well-worn bible to get rid of. I don’t
know what to do with them. Usually, I leave them on a bench in the park and
hope they find a new home. That seems to work for me. Perhaps I should leave my
kids fingerpainting artwork there as well. I’ll think about this one.

We have birthday cards and birthday and anniversary gifts
from years gone by. You dare not throw anything away since the moment you do,
someone will ask where such and such is.

I remember a terribly ugly orange and green ashtray a
distant aunt gave us for a wedding present (for you young readers: we used to
have ashtrays kept actually INSIDE the house for visitors to use). It was
horrible and I managed to drop it and break it a few weeks after it was sent.
If I’m lying, I’m dying if this old aunt (who had never visited us even once)
arrived at our door and promptly lit up her smokes. She looked around for the
beloved gift and I had to explain what happened. I lied and blamed it on our
dog. Coward that I was.

She was a very mean aunt and never came back. Not that I
really cared.

Well enough of this for this week. You watch and see how
much treasure, stuff, junk, that you will accumulate by the time you get to be
my age. Trust me, it will be more than you can imagine. Start thinking about
where you can find a good park bench. You will need it.

Until next week….Adios….

Like this? Want more?

Go to Letters From North America on Facebook and sign up…..thanks