Nov 2022 from Leslie + Time bombs

The Happy Birthday stamp looks nice on red. As I recall, I did a little bit of whining about the colors on that stamp being a little hard to work with. Leslie's solution, to use a red envelope, is brilliant. The white lettering pops with the white background on the stamp. It's no big deal that the reddish color on the stamp is orange-ish. I'm not sure my daughter is getting a kick out of her early 40s. I warned her that having kids at 35 is a ticket to the exhaustion-bin (not all the way to the looney-bin). At least she has friends who are her age who have kids in diapers so she can feel better about avoiding that whole nightmare. She doesn't have time to read all the helpful advice I find about aging. 

I was whining to my nearly 35 year old son that I was sad that I would not be alive to see him retire. A couple weeks later, he must have been thinking about my remark because he said, "By the way, mom, if you can just hang on until you are 97, you won't miss my retirement." 

My eyes rolled so hard and fast I had to sit down for a moment.

***

“These bodies of ours are time bombs, but each detonates in a different way.” Frank Bruni

That quote is from an article by Frank Bruni. I have not read his book, but here is the blurb from my library's website.

THE BEAUTY OF DUSK: On Vision Lost and Found, by Frank Bruni

"From New York Times columnist and bestselling author Frank Bruni comes a wise and moving memoir about aging, affliction, and optimism after partially losing his eyesight. One morning in late 2017, New York Times columnist Frank Bruni woke up with strangely blurred vision. He wondered at first if some goo or gunk had worked its way into his right eye. But this was no fleeting annoyance, no fixable inconvenience. Overnight, a rare stroke had cut off blood to one of his optic nerves, rendering him functionally blind in that eye--forever. And he soon learned from doctors that the same disorder could ravage his left eye, too. He could lose his sight altogether. In The Beauty of Dusk, Bruni hauntingly recounts his adjustment to this daunting reality, a medical and spiritual odyssey that involved not only reappraising his own priorities but also reaching out to, and gathering wisdom from, longtime friends and new acquaintances who had navigated their own traumas and afflictions. The result is a poignant, probing, and ultimately uplifting examination of the limits that all of us inevitably encounter, the lenses through which we choose to evaluate them and the tools we have for perseverance. Bruni's world blurred in one sense, as he experienced his first real inklings that the day isn't forever and that light inexorably fades, but sharpened in another. Confronting unexpected hardship, he felt more blessed than ever before. There was vision lost. There was also vision found"--Publisher's website.