You know you are getting old when you spend more time looking backward than forward.  Reflecting on what was and would could have been rather than what to make of today and tomorrow.  

Met with several of my old shipmates during the final weeks of our European tour.  We enjoyed a good meal together and many glasses of beer and wine. Members of the old crew had retired, jumped ship or were now working for the new captain who had come onboard almost three years earlier.   It seemed they were heading in a new direction and  much had been thrown overboard, several projects scuttled, crew members reassigned, demoted or in a new style of corporate punishment they are simply “marooned.”

In classic marooning you are left on a deserted island with only a bottle of rum and a pistol with a single bullet.  Today, one is cast from the office and isolated to one’s home and left only with the corporate cell phone and laptop to await further instructions/reassignment.  Now thanks to European white collar union protection these unfortunates are still paid, but suffer a total loss of job identity, authority and career-based self-worth.  Though still technically part of the company, their calls are not returned, their emails unanswered by their previous work colleagues.

But as I turned around the wine bottle to see what I had been drinking that evening, I was reminded that life is too short.  Time waits for no one, so don’t put off the truly important things for tomorrow.  Don’t defer those family visits and vacations.  Start making plans today for those dreamed-about “someday” trips while you still have your health and desire. Set off for those distant ports of call, cast off your lines.  Of all the crypts and cemeteries we saw in Italy and Poland, not one inscription said “I wish I had spent more time at the office.”

Lorenzo Bartolini, The Inconsolable. Pisa, Camposanto Monumentale

Update to Menace in Venice:  FACT:  Most Accidents happen close to home.

When we returned to the States last week we heard a flash flood warning on the television, but dismissed it as we aren’t in a flood zone and well above the local lake water level.  But a few hours later my wife alerted me to the fact that  we had a new water feature in the back yard.  It seems that the private road above our property had fallen into such disrepair that it had been regularly washing out in the spring rains and clogging the private storm sewer and drainage sluice down to the lake.  Water seeking its own course found an alternate route through our property, and we now had our own waterfall. And no, we don’t have flood insurance.