In The Time I Have Left

The Story Thus Far

I went to have some blood work done this morning. During the course of the chit-chat with the phlebotomist, the subject of my employer came up, and I told her that I used to work for Nummi. She has lots of clients that used to work for Nummi, so she wanted to know if I had another job.

No, I said, I was retired.

She looked at my chart, noticed my age. "Oh," she said. "You don't have much time left, you might as well enjoy it."

She must have skipped class the day they had the "things not to say to a patient" lecture. Still. I knew what she meant and appreciated the sentiment. Fortunately my blood work was a requirement of a health insurance application and not part of the treatment for some serious disease. I don't expect to die anytime soon, but I am well aware that I am closer to the end than to the beginning of my life, and indeed, I intend to take full advantage of my situation and enjoy myself as much as I can with the time I have left.

Curiously, my phlebotomist's remark did elicit in me a desire to write today. There are about fifty copies of my novel Stained Glass floating around the world, and pretty soon, they may be the only tangible evidence that I existed. I like to imagine that my granddaughter will hand a copy to her kids one day and say "here, this is your great grandfather." And in the time I have left, I think there are few more things worth saying.

So today, I'm going to hole up with my laptop and write. I need to add to my body of work so that the great grand-kids don't read one book and say "like OMG, great granddaddy was, like, a  pervert."