LIVES LIVED!

Old Watering Holes

After I retired in 1992, I quickly discovered I needed to explore new areas and develop new interests. You can only play so much golf and take so many naps. I wanted to be a renaissance man.

I bought a computer, even though I didn’t know a thing about computers. I became interested in coin collecting through some old Indian Heads my father had. I actually have a pretty good collection. Eventually, I lost interest and moved on to genealogical research. That went hand in hand with using the computer and Internet as a research tool.

The next logical step would be to write my family history and some of my own life stories. I even took two courses in creative non-fiction writing. Most of this work was done in the mid-nineties, and even though my family history is pretty much written and edited, I have yet to publish it to my family members. I do procrastinate.

As I have come back to writing, I would like to share some of these stories, personal essays, vignettes and even some bad poetry on occasion. In doing this I will start to sort it all out and finally publish it to my family members. I am not getting any younger.

I used the following quotations as guides and inspiration.

"It is only through an unfolding of the people’s histories that a nation’s culture can be studied in its full meaning. Each discovered United States family history becomes a newly revealed small piece of American History. The history of a country is only the selected histories of all of its people."

Alex Haley

"The next thing most like living one’s life over again seems to be a recollection of that life, and to make that recollection as durable as possible by putting it down in writing."

Benjamin Franklin

“The cradle rocks above an abyss; a common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour).”

Vladimir Nabokov, from his memoir, Speak Memory.

“The greatest dignity to be found in death is the dignity of the life that preceded it. This is a form of hope we can all achieve, and it is the most abiding of all. Hope resides in the meaning of what our lives have been.”

Dr. Sherwin B. Nuland’s book How We Die

“Return to old watering holes for more than water—friends and dreams are there to meet you.”

Old African Proverb.

Have a nice day!

Sam