Friday Round-Up – Boot Hill

Posted on October 14, 2017 by

1 Comment

“The world is too much with us.”

I want more and less at the same time. I want more challenge and achievement. I want days crammed with doing. But I want to go on long walks and carry nothing with me except my phone and some gum. And I don’t really want anyone asking me where I went or what I did there.

Is it essential to have a purpose-driven life? What if one has a purposeless life? Said another way, if one has lived a long time crammed with purpose, having purpose falling out of one’s ears, boring strangers with their purpose, is it possible to become purpose-free and just wander around aimlessly?

If you swim in an outdoor pool on a really sunny day all by yourself, you could really just die right after. You’re not ever going to top that situation for exquisiteness. You will never have a more perfect experience than seeing the gold circles of the sun floating under water and watching the shadow of your own stroke on the bottom of the pool. You will be a perfect swimmer in that pool, this one.

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My husband wants to get a third dog. He is obsessed with owning a retired sled dog and has started email relationships with sled dog kennels to fish around for cute retirees. I think having three dogs would make us like the veterinarians  in All Creatures Great and Small and we would have to wear tweed jackets and mucking boots all the time in between removing thorns from small kittens’ paws. The phone would ring in the middle of the night and we’d have to go off in our roadster to deliver a calf in a freezing barn. So I’m not keen on it.

“This is not our hay.” So said my four-year grandsons’ preschool teacher to the class assembled at the entrance of the pumpkin farm today. Let’s just get it straight, you can’t mess with the hay if it’s not your hay. She didn’t say that, she inflected it. It was true art like a soprano hitting the highest, purist note. Perfection.

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Category: Friday Round-Up

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Jan Wilberg

Jan Wilberg

What happens here on Red's Wrap is all over the map. There is no single theme, no overarching gripe, no malady of my own or others that dominates. I write about what seems important or interesting at the moment. It could be about gracefully handling my own aging, being a good feminist, or finding out what it means to be a decent mother and grandmother. Nothing stays the same, here or anywhere. That's a good thing. Happiness. It's relative.

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"The Power of Saying You're Sorry," Lives, Newsweek, 9-5-08
“Fury Cannot Touch Me,” Modern Love, NYT, 9/29/11

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