On such a beautiful day I naturally decided to spend it extracting thorn brambles and Russian olive trees with a shovel and a 6 foot pry bar. After a couple of hours of sweat and back ache I remembered a line from the movie “Treasure of the Sierra Madre.”
Curtin: What are you going to do with your hard-earned money old timer when you get back and cash in?
Howard: I’m getting along in years. Oh, I can still hold up my end when it comes to a hard day’s work but I ain’t the man I was once, and next year, next month, next week I won’t be the man I am today. Reckon I’ll find me some quiet place to settle down. Buy a business maybe … a grocery or a hardware store, and spend the better part of my time reading comic strips and adventure stories. One thing’s for sure … I ain’t going to go prospecting again and waste my time and money trying to find another gold mine.
I certainly know what Howard was talking about in that scene.
I’m 72 now, just you wait!
It’s funny, the first time I saw that movie I identified with Curtin, the youngest character. Now the Walter Houston character speaks to me. Yeah old age is a progressive disease. But I hear it does have a steep curve at the end.
Yes, like a graph with a negative slope on an exponential function.
I’ve been going to gym’s for a large portion of my life. When you’re young to middle aged, you go to the gym to improve. Later, the purpose is to maintain fitness and ability. If you keep at it, things eventually devolve to where your best hope to reduce the decline.
I have of late seen that very thing Tom. And as we all should know none of us are getting out of this thing alive. But it’s a great ride.