The final part of the PostSecret purloin.
What is the last thing you changed your mind about?
I was going to say the failure of ethanol, but I have another one. The use of they as a singular pronoun. For the longest time, the Sting song title, If You Love Somebody, Set Them Free bugged me. Now it does not. Now it makes so much sense. This, BTW, did not keep me from buying the 12″ single of the track.
What things helped you get through a difficult time in your life?
Ya gotta have Friends.
Over the course of your life what trip or place was most special? Why?
Running out of gas in Speculator, NY with my dad. I thought he’d be mad, because I was supposed to be the navigator, but he was surprisingly cool about it.
What would you like to re-experience again because you did not appreciate it enough the first time?
I’m hard-pressed to think of anything. To every thing, there is a season…
Can you tell me something about yourself that I don’t know that you think would surprise, shock or delight me?
Surprise? Shock? Probably, but all in good time, my pretties, all in good time. Delight? I’m always fascinated that there are stories I tell my daughter that delight her. I’m not sure why they do. One is the bathroom mirror story, which I should tell at length sometime.
How to be lazy
What habits served you the most through life?
I like to work ahead, not waiting for the last minute. That most assuredly applies to writing this blog. There’s been maybe twice since 2008 that I got up and wrote something that was published that day. Writing ahead allows me to be tired or sick or just lazy.
It’s true: if I have something due in a month, I’m most likely to do it in the first week. This doesn’t always work when you’re dependent on other people. “We have plenty of time,” they say, until we don’t.
What is the best mistake you have made, and why?
Probably moving into my grandmother’s house in the cold of early 1975. If I could survive THAT, I could survive anything.
What do you hope my siblings and I have learned from you?
From my father, I learned from my father is that you don’t have to be book smart to be successful. What I learned from my mother is patience – OK, I’m working on it – and kindness.
How are you doing right now? Is there anything on your mind right now that you’d like to talk about?
I could spend forever doing genealogy. It’s something, I realize, I do in part for my sister and my daughter. My wife’s family, the Olins, can trace their back to the late 1600s. Thanks to the new relatives I’ve discovered only in the last six months, I can go back to the 15th century. That’s about 300 years further back than I was ever able to go on the extant bloodlines I’d known about for decades.