“Time is the measure in which events can be ordered from the
past, through the present into the future, and also the measure of durations of
events and the intervals between them.”
Internet sources.
Two weeks ago I gave up the last vestiges of a job. Over the past few years my vocational life
moved from full- time (40 hours) to part-time(32 hours) to more part-time (24
hours) to a commission job (with no set hours) to no job at all. People already
are asking me, “Won’t you get tired of that?”
Years ago I was on a fishing trip with my dad. This was
one of the many fishing experiences that I enjoyed with him either at my granddad's pond or in Florida. When we went to
the family beach house at Laguna Beach, Florida (west of Panama City), he
fished all day every day that we were there.
I always joined him for at least one of those days. This particular day
instead of fishing for speckled trout, we were fishing for flounder on East Bay
(near West Bay). Flounder fishing involved catching live bait (small fish) in a
net and then heading to his favorite flounder “fishing hole”(a particular place
on the bay). We took the boat above where we intended to catch the flounder,
shut off the engine and drifted through the “fishing hole.” We repeated this
process all day until we caught enough fish to take back for my mom to fry for
the family. She always served the fresh fish with grits and plenty of sweet
tea. It was a day much like most days on
East Bay; it was absolutely beautiful. While watching my father fish and considering that he did
that all day every single day that we were in Florida, I asked him, “Dad, don’t
you ever get tired of this?” He didn’t
say a word. He slowly reeled in his
line, saw that his hook was empty, reached into the bait well and baited his
hook, threw the line into the water, sat back in his seat, lit a Salem,
took a couple of draws, slowly and deliberately looked all around at the water
and the sky, looked back at me, smiled and asked, “Crockett, what’s there to get
tired of?”
So to answer the question posed to me, “Won’t you get tired
of that?” I say, “What’s there to get tired of?” I live less than three miles
from the Catoosa County Library, less than five miles from Barnes and Noble,
less than one atom from my computer that offers me Barnes and Noble, Amazon and
Abebooks. This computer has a word processor that allows me to type letters,
essays for my blog and books. My
synthesizer is in the next room. We(two people) have three televisions
connected to a cable with a service that offers several hundred channels, On
Demand movies and Netflix. We are less than six weeks to the MLB playoffs and three weeks to the college football
season. There is enough music on YouTube and Spotify to satiate all my
listening needs. So staying at home or driving within a five mile radius there
is enough to keep me busy for the rest of my minutes, hours and days on planet
Earth. And all that is before I drive to the airport less than eight miles from
here and fly to anywhere in the United
States or the world. I don’t expect to get bored of living anytime soon. All of
a sudden with nothing better to do, there doesn’t seem to be enough time in a
day to do not much of anything in particular. I just have too many good choices
for how to spend my discretionary time(it’s all discretionary time).
But with all that said, the hardest question for me to answer these
days is, “So what have you been up to lately?”
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