You Might Be 70...

 

As I’ve said before, I get ideas for this space from a variety of places.  As my wife pointed out, I got a little too historical last week. She suggested I leave that to Christy Martin, who writes a regular column (and whose writing I look forward to).

A former educator, she is a walking library of Blount County history. I’m not from here but I’ve been here 44 years and definitely have a appreciation for the history of the area.

My point last week was to encourage everyone to get outside and partake! Hike, bike, walk, paddle—whatever. Exercise, history, and culture are available around every corner. There’s a ton of history in tiny Jarvis Park.

This morning, a patient made a comment that has put me off on one of the wildest tangents of my tangent-filled life. Maybe the reason I keep coming up with ideas for this space is that my brain travels wildly.

I blame part of that on growing up with the Encyclopedia Britannica. Those vast volumes were my travel agent, my historical perspective, my window to a world I thought I would never know. I read them with the passion and fervor that I do now with any new John Grisham novel.

A little background, amid all this rambling. I’ve told the story before about how important Boy Scouts were to me. I remember well one Scout leader that had a little knife and could carve the most wonderful of things out of any block of wood.

I was fascinated by it and made many meager attempts at duplicating his work through the years. I was particularly fond of his ball inside a cage and his chain links. It became what I did to occupy times on backpacking and canoeing trips.

I’m not very good at it but I do like to do it and when I told this patient/friend about it, he made the comment “you know, if you’ve taken up whittling, you might be 70!”

Well, uh, yeah. I’m 70 now (although it still doesn’t feel like it). What transpired next was a typical screaming train of thought and now you get to hear all about it. With all due respect to Jeff Foxworthy, here we go

If you take up whittling, you might be 70. Ok, I’ve been whittling my whole life but that new scroll saw is opening a lot of new carving doors.

If you were your family’s remote control when you were a kid, you might be 70. And there weren’t but three channels and ABC was on channel 26 and didn’t come in very well.

If you remember using the card catalog at the library, you might be 70. These days, we just jump on the computer and libraries have become so much more than just a repository for books.

If you ever visited the airport to watch planes take off, you might be 70. We did that. Old McGhee-Tyson Airport. It was fascinating. And now I’ve flown in one enough that it’s almost like riding in a bus.

If you remember who Mr. Green Jeans was, you might be 70. And Howdy Doody. And Dudley Do-Right. Spanky and Our Gang. The Three Stooges.

If you can’t really remember the last time you literally “hopped” out of bed in the morning, you might be 70. Now you stop, stretch, make sure you have feeling in your feet, then slowly pull yourself up.

If you’ve ever bragged about your lawn mower, you might be 70. OK. Guilty. And for the record, it’s a Scag that feels like it is fast enough to compete on the NASCAR circuit.