Sunday Afternoon Stories

  There comes a time in a man’s life when his body begins to break down. It’s the nature of things no matter whether it’s mechanical or biological. Obviously, there are the big health issues that are always in the back of your mind, but it’s really the small things that begin to add up. And when these little things happen in your 50s, the first thought in your head isn’t that of your eighth grade PE teacher telling you to “shake it off,” but of your own voice saying “maybe you should go see someone about this.” Case in point: As I write the first draft of this I am lying flat on my back in bed because a pinched sciatic nerve has caused a constant pain in my lower back and left leg for the past month or so. This was preceded by an ingrown toenail that had become infected after my journeyman efforts at digging the offending shard out of the flesh of my toe. For the back, I’ve been to the chiropractor three times and I’m on the mend. I think. The toenail was quickly and unceremo...

  We are all Goldilocks. Not in the way that we are a larcenous blond chick, but that we constantly are searching for what makes us comfortable. You know the fable, Goldilocks breaks into the Bears’ house, breaks Baby Bear’s chair, eats the family’s food and passes out in Mama Bear’s bed. Good thing the Bears caught her and ate her. I’ve spent a lifetime trying to figure out the point of that story. Only when I reached middle age did it finally occur to me – finding a level of comfort is important enough to risk jail time to achieve. Well, maybe not jail time or getting eaten by bears, but it is important to have a certain level of comfort in life and as we age we tend to use the products that may not make us happy, but provides us with an acceptable level of luxury. Finding that comfort is easy now, we have all sorts of products available guaranteed to give is the kind of life to which we’ve become accustomed. So yeah, compared to our antecedents, we’ve got it easy. But the nu...