Dear Blog Reader
I hope that this finds you doing well. It leaves my keyboard
in a state of cold, shivering, wetness. Which one of you did not remain steady
and took your flannel sheets off the bed before Memorial Day? Your grandmother
warned you. “You will catch your death of pneumonia if you don't wear a coat or if you take your flannel sheets off before Memorial Day.” These were hard fought
truths. Grandmother had come through the cold times. Long before the ice age
gave way to global warming, she remembered. She knew the grief of lives cut
short by losing focus and letting down your guard during the late spring.
I’m just joshing you. The current cold snap has nothing to
do with your infidelity to the flannel sheet, or your desire to pull out the
cotton. Who believes in the old wife’s tales any more? No the late spring cold
snap that occurs near the end of May every year actually has everything to do
with the wild black raspberry winter. The blast of cold air always coincides
with the blooming of the wild black raspberry canes. It is winter’s last gasp
and send off for those purple juicy nuggets of goodness.
It is hard to believe but in about six weeks the lovely Miss
Beverly will be putting on her long sleeved chambray shirt, long pants, heavy
socks and shoes; all saturated with 40% deet to keep the mosquitoes and dreaded
chiggers away. Thus clothed and carrying a one gallon ice cream bucket
suspended around her neck with a piece of orange twine, she will wade deep into
the tangle of barbed canes on a steamy early July day for the goodness that is
the wild black raspberry. Where will I be? I will be sitting in the air
conditioned house, writing a blog about the bliss of warm raspberry pie and ice
cream on the patio on the 4th of July.
So don’t worry, your impatience did not cause this cold snap
or the near freezing of this year’s apple crop. It was nature’s cycles.
I must admit I had been seduced by the warm weather, the
promise of breezy, light, cool cotton. There were three nights in a row when I
had nearly spontaneously combusted from the natural insulative properties of
the flannel. Drenched in sweat, I tossed and turned. I threw the covers off. I
fretted. It wasn’t Memorial Day yet. Black Raspberry winter had not come and
gone yet. I could not forsake the flannel sheets. And yet, I was not sleeping
well. Each day my energy was waning. Something had to be done. So when the tempting
Miss Beverly suggested that we switch out the sheets, I jumped at the chance.
We would face black raspberry winter when it came.
While spontaneous combustion was averted, insomnia remained.
I hate insomnia. When those voices in my head become so insistent that no
relief can be found, I am miserable. The interminable loop running over and
over in my head makes me crazy. 3:00 a.m. is the citical time. If I wake up
during those 60 minutes then I am usually toast. I have woke up with nothing on
my mind, not a care in the world and saw a clock that said 3:17 and it is like
I have been given a hypodermic needle to the heart of adrenaline. I am wide
awake worrying the recesses of my brain trying to solve all of the unsolvable
problems of the world.
Over the past three weeks, I have shifted the season of my
discontent from flannel induced overheating to the pall of retirement planning.
The lack of planning is a character flaw of all Sharritts. It is ingrained. It
is in our name. Prehistoric financial planners came by the Sharritt cave and
suggested that we save our money for a rainy day, and great, great, grand pappy
grunted back, “no, I think that I will share it with others.” Thankfully, I
married the lovely Miss Beverly Hoover. Hoover
I give my name too much credit by this bit of
self-deception. The character flaw is two fold. First, I hate planning for the
future because it is the great unknown. We have no idea what is ahead and how
it will unfold. The Sharritt response to uncertainty is to fold our arms across
our chests and become defensive. The second reason and probably more disturbing
is that I can’t see a day where I am not going out and working. The idea of
living off of previous savings is anathema to me. It is visceral. If I am not
producing, making more; my life is contracting, decaying. I am dying. I know
that I won’t live forever on an intellectual level. But I don’t have to embrace
it by planning for it.
Thankfully, I married the lovely Miss Beverly. Her Ying
balances my Yang. She has always been the one who advanced the future planning
agenda over my reluctance. She forced me to face my reluctance. She invited the
financial planner. There were a couple of meetings gathering data; looking for
retirement account statements that had to around here someplace, resetting
passwords on long forgotten and unchecked accounts. The depth of my denial had
no bottom.
The meetings were productive enough. Some planning had taken
place over a long enough period of time that we should be able to get by on the
finer dog foods during our golden years. Yet each night after the meetings, I
suffered from the worst insomnia. The dissonance of living off of what was
stored up is too much for my subconscious to bear. The voices would start. The ideas
would cycle. We have enough money. We can retire in 15 years and start to use
that money to live off of. The pile of money will start to shrink because we
are not adding to it. The pile will run out. I will die. Those thoughts would
cycle over and over, getting louder and louder. My eyes were wide open; my ears
listening to the deep sleepy breaths of the lovely Miss Beverly.
It’s over. The plan is made, and I have tamped down my flaws
well enough that I am sleeping just fine again. It is good to live an
introspective life; to face our demons, to fight through our fears. Yet
sometimes, Grandma was right. “Its best to just let sleeping dogs lie.”
Take care,
Roger
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