THIS WEEK, NEXT WEEK, WEEK TO WEEK

This week is the key to living in the now, not last week. Or next week.

With a calendar of baby boomer plans stretching across the entire year, focusing on one week at a time is the best way..

Why not one day at a time?

Because it’s too short, and a month is too long.

A week is just right.

Thursday originates from Thor’s-day, named in honour of Thor, the god of thunder.

Friday was derived from Frigg’s-day, Frigg, the wife of Odin, representing love and beauty, in Norse mythology.

 

The days at the end of the week surge with Thor-like power to make up for slacking the past three days, then searching for love and beauty on Friday.

Sound familiar in your twenties?

Saturday is reserved for wondering why the right love and beauty is so hard to find, and also searching for the number you got last night.

In other words, it’s hanging with your boys, lamenting with each other for being such losers, knowing that any of you could disappear into marriage and never be seen again.

One day you can’t find The One, then they find you and you can’t shake them.

Some people find The One every time they go out on a Friday.

 

Bud 1: This is the one, I’m telling you, It’s a feeling like I’ve never felt before.

Bud 2: Which feeling this time?

Bud 1: It’s not booze, or weed, or cocaine. It’s not molly, meth, or fentanyl.

Bud 2: What about purple haze, microdot, and windowpane?

Bud 1: Nope. It’s a whole new thing.

 

Love And Beauty This Week

Time, and timing, are elusive.

The biggest realization of time is when you’re late, or forget an appointment.

Otherwise it flows along, lulling you to sleep every night.

Unless you work the graveyard shift.

Or have anxiety.

That’ll keep you up, along with whoever else is in the room.

As we pass through time with a sharp eye out, there is love and beauty to behold, but it’s quick.

Someone will say something ordinary and every day, but it means more than anything.

“David made me a cup of tea,” were my mother in-law’s last words.

She’d had a stroke at ninety-one, so I started the sort of first aid that works best for English ladies.

In the world of last words, I’ll take hers.

From the baker’s daughter and prettiest girl in Strete, England, to a middle-aged Grand Dame of Culver City, to our Grandy, she lived a whirlwind kind of life that showed energy and ambition.

In her fifties, she drove up from LA with her husband in a fastback ’69 Mustang.

Her black leather pants and gold jewelry pulled the whole look together.

She looked like wild child in the city, but she was trained as a teacher, a domestic science teacher.

I don’t know what I expected, but Pat Benatar wasn’t it.

When we all lived together there wasn’t one day she didn’t dress up like she was going downtown to someplace important.

No days off, and I kept track.

I’d call it timeless elegance.

 

A Big Week

If you like to keep time, and you should, the best place to start is Greenwich, London.

Two local tourists straddle time as we know it.

I am the more excited one.

 

This picture is twenty-one years old.

We were an a American family crashing in on my wife’s relatives.

From Cambridge to Cornwall, and back, they took us in, treating their cousin like a visiting dignitary.

I was the proud daddy watching his wife bask in the limelight she avoids the rest of her life.

But not now.

Her’s is a distant family who knows how to get together, avoid confrontation with good manners, and show outsiders how it’s done.

We take the same practice we learned there and apply it here.

Sometimes it works better than others, but we keep trying.

Each week is a new chance to build better.

This week I plan on walking along the Willamette River with the cherry blossoms out.

It was also a plan for last week, and last year. I make the same plan around this time.

Why? Because I was down there one year toward the end of the bloom and the wind swirled blossoms all around like a fairytale.

Sound good to you?

I’m trying to drag my kids and grandkids along for the ride. My wife is an instant go.

Wish me luck.

The clock is running.