Wreckage

What RAMBLINGS is all about ..

Luck affects the lives of all of us. The abundance or lack of it depends to a great degree on the fortunes of birth. Browse through old copies of LIFE magazine or watch CNN for a while, and you may soon see that the overwhelming majority of our world’s six billion inhabitants was born with so little luck that even that is all bad. The basic aspiration for those poor souls is just to get through today with something to eat and a dry place to sleep.

A few of us – a very few – are born into fortunate circumstances, and such good luck early on usually, but not always, jump-starts a lifetime of more. Such later life good luck, I believe, is in direct proportion to ones ambitions and aspirations. Luck, I feel, is largely self-made. To win big means to risk big. Those who rarely lose never gamble.

Aside from the great good luck of my birth and early up-bringing, I have been blessed with a curious and adventurous temperament (see later pages: “Been there” and “Done that”). There isn’t a risk I’ve ever taken that I wouldn’t go for again. (Well, a few I’d as soon forget.) But abundant luck for any of us comes in two flavors; Good and Bad.

My down sides have included double pneumonia as a youngster, the character-building Great Depression, World War II that denied my generation the best and final years of our youth and thrust us into abrupt adulthood, a plane crash, a train wreck, major surgeries, nearly a year in hospitals, annoying disabilities I’ve had to learn to live with, the sudden and unexpected deaths of loved ones, near bankruptcy, killer hurricanes (one of which cost me most of my remaining health, another over a million dollars), and – just to cap things off – leukemia.

But all the really rough times have been more than made up for by all the truly good ones. I was born at a wondrous time and in a great place to remarkable and loving parents both of whom were college graduates and the fulfillment of their own parents’ Great American Dream. I was raised in a close and supportive family, its eldest son, and lived in a community with all available small town and big city advantages. I found and married the love of my life, beautiful Evelyn, who has given me more than I ever deserved and who’s been at my side for almost a half -century. While we were still young (and foolish) enough to give up the mainland rodent race, we settled with our four children on a tropical island and survived and thrived for 33 halcyon years in “America’s Paradise”. She and I have experienced more and have traveled farther than all our contemporaries. We’ve accumulated enough memories to fill these pages several times over.

I have a great circle of close friends who keep in regular contact and which once numbered about a hundred. Regretfully, it shrinks by two or three each passing year, and that sad trend will only continue and accelerate. A few of these old guys and dolls date back to my kindergarten days, but the blend includes with all the old, new ones, all shapes, sizes, ages, colors, and from all over. My wealth of friends have enriched my days. My occasional enemy has simply added spice to the mix.

Life has been great: full of challenges and disappointments, opportunities and failings, adventures and tragedies, good luck and bad. All in all, my cup runneth over, and its broth hath fulfilled me..

Who could ask for anything more???