I say yes to the next quarter

Today I am 75. I can honestly say that it has been a long time getting here.  I feel as if it’s a  milestone of sorts: three quarters of a century.

Me on my 75th

During the last 18 months, I have been writing my autobiography and began at the very beginning when I was just a little kid and my mother noticed that there was something wrong with the way I walked. I have relived everything: braces, high school, boyfriends, surgery, art school, marriage, divorce, many deaths, employment, being fired, marriage again, loving my work and having to quit, university and then starting CMT International. There’s a ton of life in there, 35 chapters of it. I wouldn’t have remembered a lot of it in detail if I hadn’t kept journals from 1966 until now, but I did. Whether anyone will be interested remains to be seen but for some reason I wanted to get it down. My editor and I are working on the last six chapters, I’m picking photographs for it and finishing up the final details. It will go on Amazon sometime within the next 6 to 8 weeks.

I know I’m living on borrowed time, we all are really, and I’m a lot closer to the end than I am to the beginning but I’m going to try to make the very best of the time I have left. My body is slowly breaking down. I haven’t walked in more than 20 years and my hands are getting worse by the year. I tried to turn the key in the van’s ignition today and I couldn’t. I can turn it off but I can’t turn it on and it’s got something to do with the way my wrist won’t work. I guess I won’t be driving alone anymore but I am very lucky that I have my Ron who goes everywhere with me and a couple of good friends who also accompany me for shopping trips or wherever I want to go or they want to go. Sometimes I’m just grateful to get out of the house.

I read something the other day by Ken Gallinger who writes a column on ethics, in fact I tore it out of the newspaper: ”Hope requires neither a cheery outlook nor imaginary friends. It requires only the courage to make ethical decisions in an unethical time – the courage to be kind, to be generous, to be faithful, to be loving.

In a world that too often says “no” to life, hope is the decision to say “yes, dammit, yes” – and then to live accordingly.”

I say “yes” to whatever life, and that includes CMT, has to throw at me. Yes.

From here on it’s like driving into the great unknown but there is one thing that you do know; it will end in death.  That’s one thing we all have to get our minds around as we go into our fourth-quarter. So, to those of you who are there, I say let’s drive down that road together, and say yes.

Till next time,

Linda

A bunch of hepatica from Ron after his walk in the woods