GIVE ME THE SIMPLE LIFE...

 

GIVE ME THE SIMPLE LIFE….

 

As you know by now, I have retired and moved to a rural community of about 250 souls with the nearest grocery store about 15 miles away. We are in the middle of a hay field and our allergies are acting up, but it’s something we can live with to be able to live here in peace and quiet.

I have lived in big cities nearly all of my life I and can tell you that I don’t miss it at all. Don’t get me wrong, the big cities were very good to me and afforded me many opportunities to make a good living and take care of my family. It’s just that after all of these years and being 83 years old, I am tired and want to get some pleasure out of the simple things.

We have put up some hummingbird feeders on our porches. We have tried these for years and never got any response to speak of. Here they swarm the feeders, and we can actually watch them for hours at a time. Now I have time to research stuff that I didn’t have time to do before. There are over 350 different kinds of hummingbirds, they travel about 3,000 miles each year and they are diurnal…meaning they sleep at night and fly during the day. Just like me, except I don’t fly. They have brains that are larger than any other bird as compared to body weight. Save these little bon mots as you can always use them at some fancy cocktail party in the big city….” Say, did you know that hummingbirds….?”

Stick with me and you’ll learn a lot, or maybe not.

I’m also heavily involved in trying to train a morning glory plant to take root and grow so the birds can have some flowers for food. Did you know hummingbirds eat ants? That one is free.

I have heard that the Eskimos have some 22 different words for snow. I can only think of 1 or 2 since I am not very familiar with snow nor have, I ever been.

I am more familiar with words to describe the heat in Texas in August. The folks around here use a variety of phrases much more descriptive than your average old words like, hot, oppressive, sweltering, or relentless.

Nope, here we have heat that is’ hotter than blue blazes’, ‘hot as hades’, a ‘barn burner’, ‘It’s a scorcher’. Then my favorite …which is ‘hotter than a stolen tamale’. I mean it can’t get any more descriptive than that, can it?

By the way, a hummingbird can also eat up to 2,000 insects a day. Add that to the above referenced material I have given to you and you can consider yourselves well informed.

You can thank me later.

 

See you next week…Peary Perry

 

WHY TRY?

 

WHY TRY?

Over thirty years ago, a friend of mine got transferred to England. In an effort to cheer him up I started sending him a fax (remember those?) containing a positive quotation I got from a book written by Steve Forbes. The number of people grew and grew, some dropped off and others added on. Today my list has about 70 people on it. Some I have know for many years, some I have met once or twice and some I have never met. 

To find a quotation and send it to each one of these people takes me about fifteen minutes each morning. And often times I ask myself ‘why are you doing this’?

Many of you don’t know that I wrote a weekly newspaper column called “Letter From North America” for over twenty five years to over a hundred newspapers across the country. It was a satirical humor column about people and the government. I never made any money and just did it mainly as a mind exercise and a hobby. I stopped about ten years ago when I lost my sense of humor.

Now that I am retired, I find I want to start back again but newspapers are a dying venue, so I am looking for other approaches to explore. The writing keeps my mind busy and occupied with thinking of new things and how to express myself.

But let’s go back to the daily quotation discussion. These had to be turned in every Tuesday and often I would be struggling to find something to write about on Monday evening. In my opinion some of the dumbest stuff I have ever written in a hurry received the most comments. Recently during the move, I found a folder with some of these comments thanking me for what I had written. So, you never know if it helps or hurts.

These daily quotes are the same way, I can see each day who reads them or not or if they are opened and discarded. I am often tempted to say, ‘to hell with them’ and drop them from my daily list.

But I always go back to what happened when I was writing the columns. Is this person ignoring me on purpose or are they preoccupied with some matter for which I am totally ignorant?

So, I think about them and how they got on my list to begin with and then relent and keep on sending something to them each day as I have for all of these years.

You know we never really know what is going on in other people’s lives do we? Our lives are so busy and complicated that we can never see through to the real person and express our concerns and our prayers for their well being. It takes time and a lot of effort to see beyond the masks we wear in our daily lives. Sadly, we don’t get time until it’s too late to do anything about it and we live with a sense of regret for the for opportunities lost for the rest of our lives.

So no, I won’t quit sending these out each morning. It just may be the words you needed to hear.

That is why I try.

See you next week….Peary

A MIND IS A TERRIBLE THING----

 

A MIND IS A TERRIBLE THING……

 

To waste…..

You might think that retirement is great and glorious but let me tell you that it has it’s pitfalls. For someone who has worked for over 68 years, it requires an adjustment. First off, I feel guilty laying in bed at 7am having my second cup of coffee. Secondly, the dog wants to know…’why are you still here?’. Thirdly, I have to make decisions on what to do each and every day. Going to the office was kind of like I imagine being in prison is like. All of your decisions are made for you and you just wash, rinse and repeat day after day.

But one aspect of living a quieter life without stress is that your sleep in so much more peaceful and your dreams are so much more intense. Which leads me to my next point. As you are getting older and living with less stress, does it make any sense to worry because you don’t have anything to worry about? This seems rather crazy to me. I find I keep testing my brain to check my memory to see if I have all my mental facilities. I need all I can get and don’t want to lose any.

So, the other night I was dreaming about country and western musicians. So, in my dream I can visualize this performer which we all know but can’t place his name. Same thing with the Rolling Stones. I can remember Keith Richards, Charlie Watts and Ron Wood but not the skinny lead singer. I know the country western singer sings “Blue eyes crying in the rain” and can see his face, but no recall of his name. I search (in my dream) Waylon Jennings, George Jones, Conway Twitty, Ferlin Husky and many more but no name for this red headed stranger comes to mind. I can see his guitar, but his name is a complete blank. This is not a dream; this is a nightmare. I think I am losing my mind. What is wrong here?

Do people who are losing their minds think they might be doing so?

Of course, I wake up and immediately think of Mick Jagger and Willy Nelson. So, the info was there, it was just suppressed by my sleeping?

My question is, do you think your memory bank is closed for certain things that are not accessible when you are asleep?

I know you can recall places and events that have occurred in your life in your dreams, but do you have the ability to mentally recall items that are not voluntarily offered to you as a part of the dream?

Who knows? Well at least I have given you something to think about or dream about for this week.

See you next week…Peary Perry