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Life is Fun
- by ElectricFrank
- 2013-01-27 02:01:36
- General Posting
- 1056 views
- 15 comments
I wrote the following for a reading at our local Writers Club. Thought you might like to know me better.
Life is Fun
My 82 years of life have been exciting.
Ø I know what it is like as a 7 yr old to stick a knife in an electric outlet just to feel the shock.
Ø To walk the rails across a bridge as teenager with a train coming.
Ø The thrill of exploring old mine shafts in the desert.
Ø Enjoy falling all over the sky in an airplane with me at the controls.
Ø The joy of coming home from a trip to my wonderful wife
.
Ø Delivering my son at home in 1963
Ø Me? , teach at a university even though I have no degree.
Ø Mingle with the Hippies on Haight Asbury in San Francisco during the 60s.
Ø Feeling my pacemaker being turned on while I lay wide awake on the operating table.
Ø Feeling space as I knelt blind folded reaching over the cliff edge at Big Sur trusting a partner to keep me safe.
Whats next? Well, one thing for sure.
One of these days Ill die. I look forward to being there when it happens, and to experience it with the same awareness, excitement, and curiosity.
frank
15 Comments
Frank...................
by Tattoo Man - 2013-01-27 03:01:30
................as ever, a tonic for us all. May I add..'Waking up from Cardiac Intensive Care and thinking..from now on , life is hilarious'.....Building your own house...and ..Cycling from Malaga to Ronda on the mountain road to be met at the Tajo with a full bottle of Champagne...ooh and climbing and descending Mont Ventoux 5 times.
Frank has started this wonderful thread...pitch in and list your own Big Moments....
Life is Fun..Frank..dead right it is
Tattoo Man
Good idea.
by ElectricFrank - 2013-01-27 04:01:07
We all have had great lives. Some of the experiences may not have seemed that way at the time.
Hey Tatto Man how did you know about being DEAD RIGHT. That's coming.
frank
Hi Frank.....
by Moner - 2013-01-27 05:01:43
You certainly are a very, very, interesting person.
Why am I not surprised you mingled with the hippies during the 60's on Haight Asbury, in San Francisco!
Like Rosemary said, hopefully you'll have many, many, more adventures ahead of you to share with us.
Moner
>^..^<
Great ones
by ElectricFrank - 2013-01-28 02:01:36
I was very fortunate to have a grandfather who was a licensed steam engine and father who was a mechanic. They were very patient in explaining things and always showed interest in my experiments. When I showed dad how I could shock myself with the knife in the light socket he wasn't upset. He explained why one hole in the socket would shock while the other didn't. Then he added some ways to be careful not to be grounded in water when I did it.
My grandfather was the head custodian and steam heat system engineer at the elementary school I attended. When I was in 1st grade I would meet him in the boiler room where he taught me to start and stop large blowers. In those days it was a tricky process to bring them up to speed manually. That was in the days before OSHA.
It was in the 60's that I started getting interest in how my body works, and again it was experimentation rather than formal learning. Oddly, I didn't get into the street drugs so many friends were trying. I could get wild enough feelings by hyperventilating intensely.
frank
IAN MC.....................
by Tattoo Man - 2013-01-28 02:01:46
...........................a true story..every Tuesday evening my Running Club meets at 7pm in the Common Room of an Old Peoples Home..our oldest runner, 'George' last year ran his 100th Half Marathon...he is 77 years old !!.
One day I might live at Woods Court myself, probably still wearing my Adidas Thunder Run T=shirt...with my bunch of medals tied to the emergency pull cord...
And you know what ?...none of the Staff will beleive me when I tell them that I did my first 7 mile race 12 weeks after open heart surgery for a new valve...
Then again I may have forgotten about all the running, and wonder why the hell they put me in those 10k and Half-Marathon T-shirts, coz I feel a bit dumb next to the other Old Gits in comfy plaid shirts and baggy slacks.
But wait...maybe I'll still be running and can simply run out of my cozy room every Tuesday evening,. whooping a kind of ..'Geriatric Banzai !!'
Frank..its the present that we have in our hands, isnt it.?
Tattoo Man...................BANZAI !!!
Sure is
by ElectricFrank - 2013-01-28 04:01:19
And the present is a moving target.
Your experience with the open heart surgery is a good illustration. People (if they believe you) will heap on the praise about your bravery and guts. But if you suggested NOW that you were 12 weeks away from open heart surgery and planned to do a 7 mile run?, They would be all over you on how stupid you are to even think of it.
My wife used to sign her book Keep your eye on the journey.
frank
Memories !
by IAN MC - 2013-01-28 05:01:29
I used to be an obsessive runner until my sinus node persuaded me otherwise .. some of the many running memories I have :-
- Went to Greece to do the Athens Marathon; where it all started ! Had to be in the village of "Marathon" at the crack of dawn and 26 miles later ran into an ancient amphitheatre full of cheering spectators . Really quite memorable
- Ran from Asia into Europe in the Istanbul half marathon, a beautiful run which crosses the Bosphorus. I will never forget at about 10 miles a Turkish guy ran alongside me and tried to sell me a carpet !
- The first time I ran the London marathon, I overtook a guy dressed as an ostrich ( I thought I was hallucinating at first ). At the finish the Ostrich guy limped in an hour later, took off his outfit, and it was an old school friend I hadn't seen for 20 yrs.
- Flew to Beijing and helped my daughter-in-law run The Great Wall of China marathon . It is a nightmare with loads of steps on the wall, none the right width for a human stride. Seeing her look of sheer joy, and tears, at the finish made it all worthwhile. The chop suey at the end didn't half taste good !
.... and then I had a damned PM fitted and life changed a little !!
Ian
PS...NOT ALL BAD !
by IAN MC - 2013-01-28 06:01:42
I finished on a rather miserable note . On reflection since having a PM, life has changed for the better. I no longer have the compulsive need to run long distances. I do still run occasionally but have now become an obsessive tennis player AND IT IS GREAT !
Ian
Auntie Mame said it...
by donr - 2013-01-28 12:01:24
"...life is a banquet & some poor S..'s are starving!" Or words to that effect.
Lessee, now - at a young 76 it's tough to compete w/ Frank's 82 yrs, but I've had a few interesting courses at the banquet table.
1) Marrying my wife, Mary Helen, who has stuck w/ me for 54 years come June 2013. She has kept me going through one debacle after another & moved over 36 times in our first 28 yrs.
2) Meeting the King of Thailand at their national Boy Scout Jamboree in Dec 1974.
3) Meeting Former Prime Minister Gorbachev in Moscow in Feb 1992 at their celebration of Red Army Day.
4) Attending a posthumous Congressional Medal of Honor presentation in the White House for a good friend - nearly 40 yrs after the events for which he received the Medal.
5) Witnessing the first successful 15 ft pole vault in a competition during the Christmas Holidays at an AAU track meet in Miami FL.
6) Taking a troop of American Boy Scouts to the World Jamboree in Lillehammer, Norway in Aug 1975
7) Getting the only known photo of Muscovites replacing the Russian flag on the podium that once held the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky with a Christian Flag - outside the KGB HQ. Feb 1992.
8) Experiencing the Churchillian event..."Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result." Viet Nam, April 1968.
9) Breaking ground after a near 10,000 takeoff roll in a Stretch DC-8 loaded w/ 218 soldiers returning home: Cam Ranh Bay, Viet Nam Aug 1968. The pilot announced just before releasing the brakes that "...once I release the brakes, I'm not stopping till we reach Yokota AFB, Japan. The temp at 1100 was well over 100 degrees; I swear that the tail of the plane was hanging over the end of the runway; when we finally heard the landing gear go "Thunk" as they fully extended over the far end of the runway, 218 tired, sweaty, homesick men let out a cheer you should have heard in San Francisco. My seatmate from the trip over in Aug 1967 was aboard the plane - I saw him board the plane, none the worse for the wear, considering that he was a Special Forces soldier.
10) Watching the Sun come up, 1 Oct 1987. The first morning after retiring from Uncle Sam's Army. I didn't think it would, in spite of being told that it would happen.
11) Successfully (and brashly) calling the bluff of the Communist mayor of Yomitan Village, Okinawa, when he threatened to camp out in my office if I did not accede to his demands that we stop our operations at our ammunition depot. BTW: I never told my boss about the incident. He would have had a heart attack.
12) Watching our two daughters complete the Marine Corps Marathon in Washington, DC in 1983.
13) Attend #2 Daughter's graduation from Med School in 2005. She is now an ER Doc & has not yet lost a patient to a heart attack in over 6 yrs. She LOOKS for PM's in patients.
14) The day I walked out of the hosp to play permanent host to my little buddy.
I would not trade a day of it. Well, maybe the day I was diagnosed w/ prostate cancer in Oct 2003. And the 45 successive days I held trysts w/ Enola Gay, the X-Ray machine that nuked my miserable butt. That all concluded on Good Friday, 2004.
Don
Summed it up Perfectly
by Casper - 2013-01-29 12:01:48
Frank,
You summed it up perfectly...."Keep your eye on the journey", then everything should fall into place nicely.
Great threads, I feel like I loved under a rock listening to some of you folks here.
Casper
best moment ever
by pinkington - 2013-02-01 08:02:43
one of the most perfect moments in my life was seeing Tattoo Man smile when he came round from open heart surgery in 2007
Amazing what a go for it attitude can do
by ElectricFrank - 2013-02-02 01:02:49
And how much a scared person can hurt themselves.
I'm not saying that attitude is everything, but it rarely gets credit for any of it.
frank
You know you're wired when...
You have a 25 year mortgage on your device.
Member Quotes
I am 100% pacemaker dependant and have been all my life. I try not to think about how a little metal box keeps me alive - it would drive me crazy. So I lead a very active life.
you have had a full life
by rosemarys granddaughter - 2013-01-27 03:01:21
ElectricFrank, every adventure you describe makes me want to know more about you. the one at big sur at cliffs edge scares the heck out of me. you are one in a million and I know you have another million great adventures ahead of you. you are also a great friend to many of us in the club. keep us posted of your next conquest. In Friendship RMGD