Too Short of Too Long

As I sit at the computer this morning, listening to the happy sound of the little special needs Spaniel happily crunching his morning kibble, I put on some Amy Winehouse.  Wow.  What a once in a generation talent -- and cut far too short, dead at 27.

It occurs to me that the math holds, about peoples' life spans.  People rarely leave in a Goldilocks manner -- just right.  Often they go far too long, or too short.  Of course, my Rabbi friend would correct me -- the Big Man takes us at JUST the right time.  I don't know...

We're dealing with the immense hassle of my mother in law these days.  She's 92 and seemingly staying on this mortal coil for quite a bit longer -- the better to torture Wifey, her only child.  Wifey has the Sisyphean task of trying to make the old woman happy.  Ha. As if.

Yesterday we began the process of selling and cleaning out the condo where we housed the suegra for the last year.  After my father in law died, suddenly the condo where she lived in Pembroke Pines was to terrible a place for her.  She demanded out, but not to assisted living.  So we booted our nearly 10 year tenant Lenny, a happy go lucky bachelor who would have stayed there forever, and Wifey had the place painted and decorated it -- for the long haul.  I knew there'd be no long haul.

So now, a year later, I'm taking down all the pictures I hung, and carrying out all the crap I helped carry in.  A friend took the bedroom set last night -- her brother left his wife and is moving in with her, and the set was a clutch find for her.  She asked what we wanted for it -- free to a good home, we replied.

Wifey correctly points out that I'm a Negative Nancy -- I foresee her mother being a new kind of miserable in the ALF.  We'll see, I guess.  But the point is, as the old bird gets older and meaner, well, you know...

I just re read the awesome final words of a college hero of mine --  Hunter S Thompson.  I loved his writing, and his modern, Hemingway-like life -- drugs and hookers instead of African big game.  He wrote that 50 years is all any true man should hope to live.  By 50, you ought to have done it all -- and after that, it's just a decline into less vitality, and into decrepitude.

He was 67 and wrote he was WELL past the sell by date.  He was in chronic pain from hip surgery.  Not too much was fun, anymore, even though he had made cool new buddies like Johnny Depp, who played him in a movie.  So Thompson wrote he had been "greedy" living so long past 50, and put his shotgun into his mouth.  Johnny Depp paid for his going out party -- they erected a tall tower, mixed Thompson's cremains (a terrific word) with gunpowder, and shot him into the sky with powerful fireworks, as Norman Greenbaum's "Spirit in the Sky" played.

I hope to make it well past 67 -- hopefully the coming joy of grandkids, if I'm so blessed, is something I look most forward to.  Plus, the Canes are getting real good again -- maybe another championship or so is in the cards.

As for today, I have a roofer coming early, to patch up the first leak in our 20 year old house (I think it's from a dryer vent), and then I'll head to the office.  And the day, and life, will unfold.

The "27 Club" is tragic -- great musicians, like Joplin, Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, and Amy Winehouse -- all gone far too soon.  And then there are those far too long -- well past most anything worthwhile...

The Big Man will decide, for all of us...