Fog covers the ground across the North 40 as fans are already anxiously arriving for Carb Day. We’re expecting perhaps a more rambunctious crowd this year than recent years have had. The neighborhood’s noise and traffic last night were ramped up and ready for action. Security has said they’re opening both sets of gates off 30th Street to ease the flow of traffic in/out of the North 40. Cars are already beginning to arrive but I don’t see any signs of severe delays just yet. The track should stay dry until after the concert with George Thorogood & The Destroyers. Click here for our post on parking etiquette.
G overslept and is missing the last day of school. He assures me that it’s no big deal, that nothing was planned for the day. He’s missed the bus so I guess he’s staying home and helping clean.
Tipper and I made another three-mile walk yesterday. These are taking about two hours, which is a bit slow, but at least we’re getting out and getting some exercise. I’m not sure we’ll go anywhere today, though. As rambunctious as last night was, I’m feeling the need to be a bit protective of the yard today.
My blood sugar was 368 an hour after eating last night. No, I don’t know why other than the fact that my pancreas is less than reliable now. Hopefully, I can get started on the new meds today. Numbers like that scare me. I’m anxious to see what my fasting number is this morning, but since dinner was so late last night I can’t check that until after 8:00 this morning. The fact that my pancreas is in danger of completely failing has me afraid to eat much of anything. Protein and fiber are the only things on the menu today.
There’s still some minor lawn work to do so I need to get my ass moving and get things done. Please, be safe.
![The Travesty of Morning [2010]](https://i0.wp.com/www.charlesiletbetter.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/AprilMorning_02-scaled.jpg?resize=1707%2C2560&ssl=1)
Morning Update: 05/04/24
Try sleeping late on a Saturday morning when all the animals in the house are accustomed to the 6:00 AM weekday schedule. The dogs aren’t really that much of a problem. I took them outside late enough that they were comfortable waiting on me to move first. The cats, on the other hand, are less patient. They began invading the Recovery Room when I hadn’t fed them by 7:30. They climbed on top of me, nudged me, licked me, and mewed in my face to let me know that they were going to starve to death if I didn’t get up right now. Fortunately, Kat was already awake so the impact was minimal. Still, there are days when the cats’ alarms need to turn off.
The first message I saw this morning was from a college friend, one of the smoothest tenor voices I’ve ever heard, letting me know that he, too, has now been diagnosed with cancer. I guess we’re all at that age where our bodies turn against us. Whether it is a familial inclination that plagued the generations before us or the aggregate compound effect of life’s choices, we see more of our friends fighting health battles that keep them from engaging in the things they love. We work all our lives, practice, study, and perhaps even experiment with our craft, trying to become the best we are capable of being, wanting to be one of the wise elders who is respected as we pass information down to subsequent generations. Yet, when we’re at that point in life when we should be enjoying the fruits of our labor, we get hit with some disease that strips away all that glory and leaves us with a shell that struggles to survive. We may still live but not at the timbre we did before.
I made the mistake of watching Anne Hathaway’s new movie, “The Idea of You” last night. It was a mistake not because of the quality of the movie; as rom-coms go, it was rather decent. But it highlights the challenges of not only finding love as we get older (in this case, “older” being a whopping 40 years old) but also what happens when you find it in someone significantly younger. For the movie’s characters, the solution was simply to wait five years when the social effects were less severe. Whether it’s inadvertent or not, the movie also demonstrates the degree to which finances play a role in finding these exceptional forms of love. Had the younger male character not been swimming in cash, had the female not been independently financially stable, the romance would never have happened in the first place. Money put them where they were.
There are always people in our lives who will say, “I love you.” How they mean that changes over the years. Much of the time, the definition is along the lines of, “I appreciate your place in my life and value your presence.” That’s nice, and it keeps us from being able to complain that no one loves us. What we lose, though, are those people who would define their love as a soul-level experience, a desire to be an intimate and constant part of who we are, what we’re doing, and wanting to join their lives to ours for everyone’s pleasure. That love? Yeah, you can kiss that goodbye as you get older. Companions become tolerated because, if not them, who? Even then, for how long? The deep connections we have with people erode with time. We’re no longer exciting to be with. There’s nothing new in our relationships as we become set in our ways and, we like being set in our ways.
At the end of the movie, she’s 45 with a daughter happily in college. He’s 30 with a new solo album. As the movie ends, the producers would have you believe that their relationship picks right back up with the same level of passion as before. You and I both know that’s not the way it works, though. Things happened over those five years. Everyone changes. Five years, especially when you’re twenty-five, is a long time and our emotions change dramatically. We might remember former loves tenderly, even longingly, but the day-to-day is going to have less passion, less heat, and more illness and doctor’s visits and disparities between our desires. Maybe he wants a family. She already has one. He wants to keep that jet-set life. She’s anchored to the business she owns. As the movie fades to black, the relationship inevitably falls apart.
Maybe what’s disturbing is that ending: all our lives slowly fade to black. We still want that high, the fiery love that we knew when we were young and healthy but it’s no longer something we can maintain. Not only is the other person letting go, but we let go of ourselves because who we are now is not the person we thought we’d be.
Or maybe I’m just an old man babbling in a pool of loneliness. I really shouldn’t watch rom-coms.
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