Often when we head back to PA from mid-coast Maine, one of us will comment about how we wish we could stay. Maine feels like home. There’s family there, we’re back in New England again, there are woods and hills and ocean in close proximity to one another, and the pace of things feels somewhat slower. Where we stay has a bit of a ’60s flower child vibe to it, but that’s OK– it’s a whole lot better than what often emanates from D.C. and what’s on the prevailing political winds where we currently live.
Tag: dailyprompt
Not Quite Hard-wired
Daily writing prompt
What’s one thing you wish you had started doing earlier in life?
The first thing to come to mind is developing discipline regarding diet and exercise. A close second would be developing a sense for generating and managing income, which might have made this current chapter of earthly life a bit less stressful and somehow more enjoyable.
A close third would be some level of self-awareness or something that might have helped me break free of being such a creature of habit and so inhospitable to sudden changes in plans.
A Winged Friend
Daily writing prompt
If you could pick any fictional animal to be your lifelong companion (like a Pokémon or fantasy pet), what would it be?
Probably Hedwig. I’ve always been intrigued by owls, and she seems to have it all together- a silent sentinel, vigilant, there when you need her. And, well, wise.
Tough One
Daily writing prompt
If you had to switch lives with a fictional character for a week, who would you choose?
Maybe Indiana Jones, maybe Big Bird. Not sure they’d be terribly enamored with the switch, though. To be honest, I looked at one list of someone’s take on the top 100 fictional characters, and I wasn’t really keen on switching lives with any of them, the above two included.
Hardly Ever
Daily writing prompt
Have you ever liked a villain more than the hero? Who and why?
The only matchup coming to mind is Wile E Coyote and the Roadrunner. I feel like there might have been moments when the roadrunner came across as an annoying creature aching for comeuppance. Most of the time, I was rooting for him, but not all of the time. There was a bit of sympathy for the coyote, maybe because he was so hapless.
I’m having a difficult time coming up with an example for live action movies. I couldn’t stand Heath Ledger’s Joker, couldn’t bite on his arguments that had Bruce Wayne so conflicted; not at all sympathetic to me.
By A Relative Nose
I started War and Peace a number of years ago but only got half-way through it, so I think it might be close between Barack Obama’s first autobiographical offering and a biography of Abraham Lincoln by Jon Meacham– And There Was Light.
The more I think about it, it was probably President Obama’s book. It was nice to have a couple of multi-page spreads of pictures to break things up. 🙂
More Than Convenience
In PA they’re called boroughs instead of towns. There are cities, but we don’t live in one.
Anyway, we used to have a community hospital that served the local area for years, but its sale in the late 90s/early 2000s led to a reduction in services and eventual closure. The new ownership had fewer ties to the local community and the focus narrowed to a creation of a site for serving the mentally ill.
There is some movement and periodic clamor among local folks to bring the hospital back, at either the same site or a new one somewhere in the immediate area. Currently, our options for emergency medical care include ambulance service to hospitals that are either 12, 17, or 25 miles away, along with a couple of those smaller outlets that treat cuts and scrapes and bug bites, maybe a broken bone.
So, a revitalized, functioning local hospital is high on many a priority list.
A pilgrimage, of sorts
In 2013, I was able to join a group that went to Israel. I drove from southeastern PA to central MA, where my parents lived, caught a shuttle to Logan International in Boston, flew to Frankfurt, Germany, then on to Tel Aviv. We stayed in Jerusalem and spent time there at the beginning and end of the visit, and in between spent a week traveling most of the length and width of the country, saw many biblical sites and other places that wouldn’t show up on a regular guided tour’s itinerary.
It was memorable.
Luny Toons
I haven’t watched cartoons for a long time, except for an occasional episode of Paw Patrol or Bluey, with the grandchildren. We watched a lot of Roadrunner cartoons back in the day, also Rocky and Bullwinkle and Mighty Mouse. It would have to be one of those characters.
Wile E Coyote was a sad and inept, somehow sympathetic villain, and I found myself occasionally annoyed by the roadrunner (the real villain?), so maybe Mighty Mouse, because he always saved the day.
Current characters? Maybe Peter or Lois Griffin, or the whole crew from South Park.
Laissez-faire
Directly. I’ve never had much discipline or drive– at least in the direction of financial success, so such success by just about any measure never materialized for me, for us.
I have always recognized that a certain restraint is important, and saving money– in a savings account and by other means– along the way makes all the sense in the world. But I’m at the point now where saving for a rainy day doesn’t make as much sense. In fact, it grates on me sometimes.
Even though it will always be sensible to think about finances with a certain discipline in mind, I am quite willing to spend a bit and enjoy life without always worrying about some eventuality that may or may not ever unfold– especially when one looks around and realizes that maybe we should be taking occasional opportunities to travel or otherwise indulge ourselves while we still can.
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