By Jim Hagarty
2018
For some reason I am not quite able to grasp, people I know have been telling me lately that I only live once. I mastered that concept when I was very young and while I can’t recall my exact reaction to the news that I would disappear like a cloud one day, I don’t imagine it was good. In fact, I was probably horrified at the idea. So, for 67 years, I have tried to put the notion of my impending mortality out of my mind.
But along come friends and even neighbours to impress on me that my current state of being is only temporary. Of course, they follow that up with advice to swing for the fences, to do what I have been putting off doing. Buy something I really want to have or go somewhere I really want to be. My neighbour, right across the street from me, has a swimming pool, an outdoor hot tub with a roof, a camper van, two boats, two snowmobiles, a family van and an SUV, and, get this, two Corvettes. Why two Corvettes you ask. The answer is, my neighbour plans on living only once and he is going to enjoy every moment while here. Oh, and he spends a couple of weeks scuba diving every winter off some south sea island or other.
Not one of these things is a part of my life today. In my mind, that is not because I am not daring, but due to the fact that I don’t really want most of what my neighbour has. OK, maybe the hot tub.
My neighbour and I talk now and then and I don’t think we have had a conversation in the past five years during which he has not mentioned the fact that my time is running out and I should have some fun. It can all be over in the snap of a fingers, he says. All I have really taken from that is the certainty that I have got to cut down on the number of times I snap my fingers.
Others lately have also been impressing on me the idea that I cannot take it with me. The follow up to that is that I may as well get rid of it while I am here. I think they are talking about my money. I guess they are unaware that I got rid of that years ago and have been coasting on fumes ever since.
“Spend your kids’ inheritance,” a cousin urged me just this week as he told me to go get something I’ve always really wanted. This might be a good idea, but it leaves me with a decision to make, whether to go after Sandra Bullock or Julia Roberts.
I am not sure how my kids would react if I got busy and spent their inheritance. I am thinking they would prefer me to leave a few dollars behind. And I think, if my parents had spent their kids’ inheritance, I might be living in a flea-bitten motel somewhere right now or under a bridge. The very house I am comfortably situated in tonight, typing this profound letter to you, is only my reality because my parents did not spend my inheritance. It might have been nice to see them have a little more fun while they were here, but I have never done well sleeping under bridges. The darned raccoons, snakes and stray cats keep you awake. And opossums are the worst. They can stink up a riverbank real bad.
So, I only live once, I can’t take it with me, it can all be over in a heartbeat or absence of one, and I should spend my kids into poverty, seem to be the considered advice of the people around me these days. Which leads me to wonder why the matter of my continued existence seems to be such a matter of urgency to them. What do they know that I don’t? Has my doctor been sharing my medical records around in the bars at night? Are they aware of some nefarious plot by a terrorist to blow up my car with me in it? Have they been following the weather patterns and are certain a hurricane is about to bear down on my bungalow? If any of these things is the case, I would appreciate if they would share with me the doctor’s prognosis, the terrorist’s manifesto or the weatherman’s forecast.
Failing any of that, the phone numbers of Sandra Bullock and/or Julia Roberts would be nice.
