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Life Lessons

A Song of Whitman, Myself

Copyright 2007 Ben S. Pollock

A pet peeve is one of those list poems,
It’s why Whitman bores me then I feel guilty,
because isn’t he some kind of Poetry God?
But for the last 29 of my fifty years,
I’ve bound myself with society’s popular rules.
If its wisdom is questionable
My wisdom must be mushy.

The following list will be well-disguised.

A Ramble for Fifty

A Doris Lessing novel I was reading in honor of her recent Nobel had an aside that’s stuck with me: Something about an available house that had a selling point of being a short drive from a great ramble. The British have rambles, which we Yanks call day hikes. But that’s a loose translation from the English. A day hike has a deliberateness about it, not to mention a weighty day pack. The rambler strolls, and if he or she expects to be out long and not passing a pub, might carry a lunch in a bag. Wordsworth and his sister rambled for hours in the countryside, Dickens and his Muse for miles on London streets.

Which isn’t really my point. That’s OK: This is a ramble.

My point is the guilt I have over resolving to walk around Wilson Park every weekday in November. It’s the short drive there. I could walk our little neighborhood, with its loose dogs and occasional sidewalks. Wilson Park has the magic castle but mainly that Funky Fayetteville Feel. Is it worth burning gas?

Which isn’t quite my point. That’s OK: This is a ramble. And I’ll be fifty in two days.

There’s any number of pleasures I tend to deny myself because they’re scientifically proven to be less than good. They’d shorten my life. There are tasks I don’t enjoy that I should do. They’re said to lengthen my life. All these are to add days at the end, when I won’t be feeling particularly well, in any case.

Why not gorge an entire bag of Fritos with green onion dip? All that oil, salt and unneeded carbs costs about 18 hours at the end. The dip, another six. A sack of chips and tub of dip every week or two from here out will drop my expected death from 82 years to 81 and seven-eighths?

I’ve worked late into the night for six months on finding my preferred ratio of dry vermouth to gin in a traditional martini. Every experiment cuts about two hours off the end of my life. Mr. Hyde? Dr. Jekyll finds that his research indicates that one or two martinis a week to be worth four or five days at the end. … Besides, olives are a vegetable.

The hypocrisy of driving to get a walk means that I don’t bicycle to the park through car exhaust nor endure the taunts of North Street dragsters. And that good-for-me walk happens to be in an well-tended park, among trees and flowers … and sorority girls, jogging every which way.

Of course, I’m a moderate guy to begin with. I don’t gorge daily or drink daily. What I’ve realized in the weeks leading up to the Big Fifty is that it’s not the end of life I need to worry about. I quit smoking 21 years ago because it made me cough and hack at the time. If salty snacks too many and too often make me bloated now, now is when I need to cut back. If I drink too much now, now is when I can do damage and must cut back. If a lack of walking saps me now, now is when I need to allow myself to find pleasurable exercise, in nature or games.

I am not going to join the treadmill club. That’s boring. And boring is wrong when you’re fifty.

Which finally is my point. That’s OK: This has been a ramble.

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