I have been a weather-watcher from way back and one of the longest lasting CoCoRahs volunteers. I lived through the Fort Collins flood in 1998 and started measuring for CoCoRahs at its inception, but this afternoon was amazing to me! We live halfway between Walsenburg and La Veta in southern Colorado.

It started raining around 2pm and soon turned to hail, lots of it! It has been raining ever since…

Now, at almost 5pm, we have way over an inch of rain in the gauge and it’s still raining…

We LOVE to get precipitation in this part of Colorado, especially since we have been in a serious drought for years now, but not when it completely drowns my garden!

TOTAL precipitation from 7AM on May 17th to 7AM on the 18th at our home: 4 inches!!!

My garden plants were not amused with 2 inches of hail…

While I was away this past week, I found myself gorging on so many films that I have missed by being unable to stream out here in the wilds of Huerfano County. I know, hard to believe, but we haven’t had that ability until now. First we had the wildfire in 2018, which knocked out all Internet access for two months, and then the only service we could get didn’t have enough bandwidth for streaming.

So what was my favorite movie of the ten or so I watched this past week? Uncle Frank, introduced at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2020 and released in November 2020 by Amazon Studios. So many things about this film reminded me of me. The main character is a teenage girl about my age in 1973, it’s set in a small southern town, not so different than the one I grew up in in Kansas, and her family has a lot of biases and family secrets.

This young woman named Beth, is saved from that small town life by her Uncle Frank, a professor in New York City, who is the only person encouraging her to get out and experience the rest of the world. She decides to go to NYC to college at age eighteen, but she is still so naive because of her age and small town upbringing.

Beth meets a guy named Bruce and they show up unannounced to a party at Frank’s apartment. Through events that happen at the party, she discovers that Frank is secretly gay and has been living with a man named Walid (“Wally”) for over ten years. Frank rejects a sexual advance on Bruce’s part, then takes care of Beth when she gets too drunk. Then Uncle Frank pleads with her not to tell anyone else in the family his secret, and she agrees.

The next day, Beth’s grandfather and Frank’s father, Daddy Mac, dies of a sudden heart attack. Frank agrees to drive Beth back to South Carolina for the funeral. The family scenes back in Creekville, South Carolina are crucial to the story and bring back stories from Frank’s sad past, as well as his addiction to alcohol.

This left me wondering how many more family stories we had in both sides of my family. I know my Mom’s first cousin died young in a mental hospital of suicide and I remember how creepy my Uncle Bill felt to be around. He died young of alcoholism. One cousin has since died of a heroin overdose and my brother is doing a great job of smoking himself to death at this point. What in their family stories led them to such self-destruction?

On the other hand, while in Denver I did get a chance to see my Dad’s final book, completed after his death, the third edition, revised & expanded of “Trees and Shrubs of New Mexico” where the new editor Jennifer Bousselot wrote a marvelous introduction describing the total dedication my Dad showed his entire adult life to fieldwork and botany. My Dad always loved his work and it really showed. I have always envied his dedication to one goal, because I tend towards many interests and avocations.

It appears we cannot help but look back on our lives in our later years, and we are lucky if we feel good about it all. At this point, when I look back over my life, I cannot believe the multitude of places I’ve been with so many different types of experience! I sometimes wonder why I felt like I had to learn Chinese in my twenties or experience Venice in my thirties. They certainly weren’t always the best experiences, but I definitely did follow my heart…

“…we all know how this ends, so rushing through life is senseless. As our inner life grows ever more luminous, the chatter of the speed-and-greed world slowly fades, leaving us with greater peace, tranquility, quiet and contentment.”  — Arthur Rosenfeld

“Be happy for this moment. This moment is your life.” – Omar Khayyam

Shadowlands is a film from 1993 about the relationship between academic C.S. Lewis and American poet Joy Davidman, and how she challenged how he saw himseIf and his entire way of life. I just watched “Shadowlands” for the fifth time after quite a few years. Watching it this time I understood much more deeply and clearly why this is one of my most favorite movies of all time. To summarize:

The triumph of emotions over logic!

I was raises to be seriously logical and intellectual. My father, the academic, took great pride in his transition from the son of a railroad man to a college professor. He attributed that success within himself to discipline and reason, and so he taught his children to restrain from emotions in favor of rational thought and science. In the film, Joy’s introduction to the grand age-old traditions of British academia at Cambridge represent to me that world, the comfortable, safe rule of rational thought.

Enter Joy Davidson, with her refreshingly straightforward honesty in the face of Mr. Lewis’s pomp and circumstance. This was me. I played that role in my father’s life. I would challenge his beliefs all the time. I was threatening because in his world, where everyone was younger, weaker and looked up to him, I was direct and honest in challenging those things that made no sense to me. For example, his praise of emotionlessness. He once said that the word love made no sense. There was no clear definition for love, so in a way, it does not exist. This needed to be challenged! His whole life I challenged him and he didn’t like it.

In contrast, in Shadowlands, Professor Lewis comes to appreciate Joy’s candor and deeply loved her for it. She brings him back to life. She was a bright spark with her passion for honesty and saying-it-like-it is. My father never became very comfortable with me or his emotions. He only acknowledged deep feelings when he was overcome by them.

I have learned that I was raised with far too many rules about everything from both my mother and father, and I have been breaking them ever since. Mike has been instrumental in pointing this out to me and I so appreciate that aspect of our relationship!

I have learned that there is no proper way to see and live your life, only the way you choose. By setting your own rules, you learn who you really are inside, for better or worse. That can be quite satisfying. It is a major part of your own uniqueness. And if you don’t, you may discover when it’s time to die, you have not lived.

Mike is 66 and had 13 polyps removed yesterday and I had my own anxiety attack waiting for them to come out and tell me what was going on. They said it would only take about a half hour and they still hadn’t said anything to me in over an hour. He has a very bad family history with cancer in general and specifically colon cancer. His Mom died of it at age 53. Hopefully we saved his life yesterday. Still waiting for the microscopic report on those polyps, but the doc was very thorough and he said he saw no cancer. I’m freaked. Every time he makes any noise in the next room I go to see if he’s OK.

Is this enough to convince you to get that colonoscopy? Yes the prep sucks, without a doubt, but compared to colon cancer, not so much…

I imagine it is a rare 60+ year-old who doesn’t have a few regrets about some stupid things they did earlier in their life. It appears the most common regrets are financial mistakes that are catching up with them now. For example, poor planning for retirement, not saving enough, early withdrawals from retirement accounts, and underestimating how long we might live.

I never made much so this saying worked for me:

“The amount of money you have has got nothing to do with what you earn. People earning a million dollars a year can have no money, and people earning $35,000 a year can be quite well off. It’s not what you earn, it’s what you spend.”  ~Paul Clitheroe

Other regrets are health-related. Obesity is a common problem for Boomers. The approximate prevalence of obesity is 40.0% among American adults aged 20 to 39 years, 44.8% among adults aged 40 to 59 years, and 42.8% among adults 60 and older. Over 40 % of baby boomers are obese, up from about 29 % of their parents’ generation. This epidemic of obesity is the primary health concern for boomers today. Why are baby boomers so unhealthy? One culprit in there being so many obesity-related chronic diseases in Boomers, could be the big dietary shift that began in the 1950s to fast, convenient, processed foods with additives and preservatives. This generation also felt the need to overwork and were generally too busy, making the pull toward fast food even stronger.

Another strong regret? That they didn’t travel more when they were younger. I was brain-washed from an early age to save, save, save, but also belonged to a traveling family. I had a free trip to Bangkok at age 19 and I took it. Then it was trips to Asia regularly until I lost interest. I also enjoyed a number of trips to the Caribbean and Mexico, and a trip to Paris and Italy in the 1980s. I also took another free trip to Cuenca, Ecuador before we moved down here.

My regrets lean more towards some of the relationship choices I made in my 20s and 30s, ones that set me on a path of destruction for decades. Put simply, I trusted the wrong people because I was young and stupid. Even my first marriage at age 39 was stupid, but lucrative 🙂 Which brings me to a few of my favorite quotes from that period…

Sometimes I sit and wonder, what was I thinking? But then I try to give myself a break and summarize with live and learn. And that’s really the point, isn’t it?

WE MUST LEARN FROM OUR MISTAKES!

I finally got marriage right at age 50, and when it’s right, IT’S RIGHT! After being hard on myself forever for not producing more or having more to show for my life, I met a partner with a great attitude. His opinion?

Get to it! Embrace the imperfection and enjoy the ride!

The irony is that he is a perfectionist and yet he chose me! I have never figured that one out, but we are committed for life now, come sunshine or rain. My revised opinion of regrets is very similar to what Willie Nelson said in his interview yesterday:

“If I changed anything in my past, I wouldn’t be where I am now… and I love where I am now!”