I am not sure of my ethnicity but think it is part English, some Scot, maybe some Irish.  I am fairly certain that Gypsy is not coursing thru my veins.  I wish it was.  From movies I have seen and things I have read, those folks have a passion for life that few of us can muster.  They get excited by life. Their music makes them dance, their dancing makes them hungry for food cooked over an open fire and their food makes them want to drink some wine that may or may not be of the proper aging.  There seems to me a natural rhythm to their lives.

Lately I have been listening to some old music that seems to have grown on me.  A rendition of “Petite Fleur” by Chris Barber seems to start my old feet to moving.  I want to follow that music with some dance steps that have been gone from my repertoire for some time.  It is almost like playing “air guitar”.  You just want to move.  Tonite I listened to “Stranger on the Shore” as done by Acker Bilk.  It does the same thing.  Both of these songs put gypsy in my soul and in my feet.  Alas, you cant always be what you arent.  You cant be a cowboy as you wanted when you were 5 yrs old.  Or an ace fighter pilot.  There has already been one John Wayne.  I settled in comfortably as a father, a husband and a CPA. All of those are kind of like being a gypsy. 

Here I stand, watching the tide go out.  So alone and blue, dreaming dreams of you.  I watched your ship as it sailed out to the sea, taking all my dreams and taking all of me.   Those certainly sound like the words to a gypsy song. Put the the sounds of a clarinet to those words and they will make you want to dance, eat at the camp fire and generally think gypsy thoughts.  They will make you have a passion for life.

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I have spent most of my life in a race.  I have never known or really cared what I was in a race with, a race against, or a race from.  I just felt like I had to run.  Not a physical run like many of my loved ones who run in marathons, etc, but still a race.  A race for perfection?  A race to provide?  The need to race has caused me to ignore time to reflect.  I have been trying thru these blogs to catch up on some of that reflection that I missed.

I feel privileged to have lived thru what I feel is the time of the greatest music that has ever been written.  This music was sung by artists of unsurpassed talent.  I am talking of Roy, Elvis, Conway, Brenda and, well you know who I mean.  These folks could sing.  You could listen to their lyrics and recognize every single emotion that was coursing thru your mind on any given day.  They sang their songs as if they were being sung directly to you.  And you could dance to their songs as well.  Nothing like a slow dance to a song sung by Brook Benton.  Enough to make you ask a girl to go steady.

I am also privileged to have been raised in a time of budding prosperity.  The era after WWII produced a time of employment, a time of growth of family and  a time of exploration of not only our world but the space our world spins in.  Great things were accomplished by great men.  We somehow lost those kind of men.  I wish we had them back.  We need an Ike, we need a Harry.  We need men of vision.  We don’t need men who are after what they can get for themselves or their cronies.  We need men like Woodrow Call.  He was called a man of vision and his answer was ” man of vision?,  a hell of a vision”.

Maybe I have answered what my race was all about.  Maybe I was running to become a man of vision?  Maybe I was just trying to become a man.  Maybe I accomplished both of those things and just didn’t recognize when I had accomplished either.  Maybe I crossed the finish line of a race I really never understood.

As I gracefully age maybe I will have more time to reflect and to enjoy what has been a life worth living and one worth being proud of.

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I sit in an easy chair, in the shade of my patio.  My eyelids are drooping as well as my chin.  I am at the edge of the abyss of a full-blown morning nap.  This is the most nefarious of all naps when considered by a workaholic.  No one naps in the morning.  My eyes are also clouded by the haze from my smoker as I patiently wait for my next two nights meals to properly smoke.  My mind is wandering as it often does, more so lately, and I am thinking of the past and dreaming about the future.  My mind is telling me that I have grown too old to see many of nature’s wonders that I have often felt that I deserved to see.  I have missed the chance to see the flora and fauna of the highlands of New Guinea and Borneo.  I have missed seeing the birds of paradise that inhabit these lands of mist and mystery.  I can see their beauty through the help on NatGeo TV but it just isn’t the same. 

My consciousness is suddenly disturbed by the drone like sound of one of God’s really beautiful creatures.  My mind is pulled back from the brink of napland and my eyes spring open in time to catch a glimpse of the “Sky Opal”.  An opal is a stone that shows both fire and ice and is considered by many as a more beautiful stone than the more precious diamond.  It shows reds, greens, golds, and changes at even the smallest turn of your hand.  The Sky Opal shows all of these features plus it moves with the speed of a blue darter.  With every turn of its tiny body and the rotation of its wings, you can see a dash of red, a slash of blue, a splotch of green and sometimes a spot of yellow.  What a gorgeous creature.  I can only think that God made the Sky Opal (the hummingbird) for all of us who have not directed our lives to allow us to make the exotic trips to lands of dreams.  You can keep your birds of paradise as I have my Sky Opal.
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