In 2018, I am finally going to start a blog working through 365 days of impacts on my life. This is meant to tell the story of who I came to be in bits and pieces. This exercise is meant to show we are all shaped by the people, situations, circumstances, joys and sorrows that have impacted our lives. Sometimes we are influenced just as much through learning about what we don't want to be like, than what we turned out to be. Sometimes it is a stranger who makes a lasting impression on us, and we may never know their name. Sometimes it is those who've been the worst to us that actually teach us the BEST lessons. If nothing else, since I don't have kids, this will serve as an autobiography of experiences that have shaped my character since May 3 1965. I will try to include pictures where I needed. Some will not need pictures. As I enter my 5th decade, I can look back and say that In my teens (as most are) I was extremely insecure, unfocused and had stage f...
One of the movies that mage a huge impact on my life was Harold and Maude. If you've never seen it, it puts the Quirk in Quirkiness. But for some reason it really struck me when I saw it in my early 20s. The storyline is about Nineteen-year-old Harold Chasen who is obsessed with death. He fakes suicides to shock his self-obsessed mother, drives a customized Jaguar hearse, and attends funerals of complete strangers. Seventy-nine-year-old Maude Chardin, on the other hand, adores life. She liberates trees from city sidewalks and transplants them to the forest, paints smiles on the faces of church statues, and “borrows” cars to remind their owners that life is fleeting—here today, gone tomorrow! A chance meeting between the two turns into a madcap, whirlwind romance, and Harold learns that life is worth living. As you can imagine, I totally identify with Maude, but at the time I was 20. I also always felt at that time like I would not find my soulmate. The concept of being almost 80 and single was not foreign to me. I found comfort in her finding Harold as odd as the romance was. The concept of a 20 something being with a 70 something in today's age is not as wierd as it was in the 80s and 90s. This was the first time in my life I had ever considered not dating in my age range. I think this is the thing that struck me. This is an extreme of course. But if we treated life like the judges on the Voice treat the blind auditions, if you really identified with the person - then you would turn your chair around. Why should their appearance or age matter? It is about compatibility, not looks or age. Ponder that for a moment.
