On cold winter days, when you are driving through a heavy snow storm, looking forward through the windshield, you can hardly see where you are going. But if you look in the rearview mirror, you can see a long way behind you. Life can be like that. On days when it is hard to see where you are going, it pays to look at where you’ve been.
When I look back on my life, it seems like it began when children came into our lives. Everything before that seems to be unimportant. Now there are these precious beings that are going to rely on us to lead them in the right way for many years. We thought it would be easy, that we knew how to go about it. If those little ones had a lot to learn, us big ones had even more. Did we learn our lesson well? I think the proof would “be in the pudding.” We thanked God every night for the wonderful family He entrusted to us.
It has been a long road…I am well into my 96th year and some of the memories are growing dim. In my youth my every effort was put into baseball which I played at every opportunity. Any career thoughts I had there went out the window when a war came along and I found myself in the South Pacific for three long years. Ahh, but I wasn’t going to allow something like that ruin my life. In Australia I found the most beautiful girl in the world and we had 59 wonderful years together. Mary is long gone now but it is a rare moment when she is out of my thoughts. As it says in the song, “I speak her name in my every prayer” and, as a matter of fact, God has appointed her my guardian angel and she is still looking after my every move.
We would be blessed with four children and they would all be wonderful and they would all be different. The two oldest would live far away but would stay in touch and would always be here if I needed them. The two younger ones live close by and I find myself leaning on them more and more as time goes by.
When we found ourselves with an empty nest, we flew the coop like we had been imprisoned. We had planned well and had a travel trailer and all our toys as we traveled from Maine to Florida to Alaska and back; canoeing, biking, snowshoeing, golfing skiing hiking and playing tennis. Life was good and we had a lot of fun.
And so the end of the road is just around the next bend. Do I have any regrets? You bet!! I only wish I had taught the rest of the world to have as much fun as I had – what a laugh that would have been! But we all do the best we can and I think if we all keep doing that, eventually this will be a better place to live in.
These, of course, are the reminiscings of an old, old man who is still lucking enough to enjoy golf, tennis, biking and swimming. But if they were good enough to inspire someone else to have some fun, it would all be worth the effort.
Buck Carson