My Wonderful Town

How lucky to have been driving home last night from working on a project and catching this gorgeous sunset.  Jim (my new neighbor down the street who has become a great friend) and I were driving through downtown  just in time to catch it.  We went out to the end of the breakwater, parked, and spent a good hour taking pictures.  The scene changed constantly and it was impossible to catch all of the different mutations of color, clouds, and fog.  Actually Jim took all the pictures since my camera was home on its charger, while I simply absorbed the spectacle.  There had been a thunderstorm about an hour earlier, which I'm sure was the beginning of the weather system that caused the chaos.  The last picture was taken just before we left, as things settled down for the night.  At some point in the near future I intend to bring this blog up to date, though I have to say nothing significant has happened since I last wrote regularly.  I am getting older, of course, but basically not much has changed in my world.    I am 73 years old now, which is impossible to believe.  Yet I know that I first became aware of politics when Eisenhower became president.  I remember seeing graffiti on the board fence across the street from our apartment in Portsmouth that warned "Don't go back to the breadline.  Vote for Adlai E. Stevenson."  I remember the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. I remember the race riots, the National Guard hosing down blacks on Florida beaches, the Viet Nam War. I remember clearly the assassination of John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King.  I remember the first satellite to orbit the earth, the first walk on the moon, the Challenger blowing up.  After that, the events seem less traumatic.  With time, one realizes that one's own life goes on no matter what......and then it ends no matter what.  I used to feel comforted by the fact that young people, with their energy and new ideas, would always come along and try to fix things that are wrong.  I wonder now if the world is  too big and complicated, that they have been forced to retreat into themselves.  I also know there is nothing I can do about anything.

So I scale down what impacts my little life in order to find great pleasure in what is around me.  Last night's sunset is an example of that.