QUO VADIS?

"For what is true in the morning, shall by the evening, have become a lie." Here I am, summering on Nantucket rather than simmering in Sarasota. On life's journey, every once in a while, you have to stop, turn on your flashlight and check your bearings. Just a few short months ago, I said to the Kitty... "We're spending the summer where?" Things are changing all around me. Babies being born, friends dying, a series of body parts needing repair, the innumerable black oil spills on the pristine white beach of my life. I hold on tight to the constants, the dependable beacons, in hopes that they will guide me, but often the signs are fading from too many years in the weather. We start our lives on training wheels and end up on a walker. It is a Circle Line Tour from diapers to Depends, no teeth to false teeth, and sleeping most of the day to sleeping most of the day. We go from being dependent for our very existence on our parents to being dependent on our children.

And yet, as our physical world changes and the sign posts zip by more quickly (my 103 year old grandmother told me that she felt as if she had a birthday every day) do we make the course corrections we need to make in how we look at life, or are they made for us? Here I am, just a bit into the Medicare demographic, back on my bicycle, spending days outdoors just like we did when I was a little kid. I grew up in New York, Westchester to be precise, Pelham Manor to be even more so, and we had our annual routine. Each summer, my family would "pack up the babies, grab the old ladies" and head out to Sag Harbor, Long Island. We had two adjacent cottages so everybody could fit and be together. Kids slept on the floor. Not 23 room cottages and bungalows like you see out in the Hamptons and on the Cape today, ours were little itsy bitsy salt boxes, but they backed up to the water. There were row boats, and fishing poles, and crab traps, and that big sand beach a short drive away. From the time I was one year old, all the cousins would vacation together. The mothers would stay the whole summer with the kids "out on the island." The fathers would come out for the weekends and go back "to the city" and back to work during the weekdays.

Her I am, with the Kitty, "out on the island" only this time with our kids, one here all summer and the other coming next week, and their spouses and kids. And the wheel of life turns. As the French say "The more things change, the more they remain the same." The adjustments will come, go with the flow, and enjoy the ride (too many cliche's in a row, I know) but life does tend to be a string of them, all the same.