Older but wiser is not necessarily an obvious progression through life





With 2010 just around the corner I thought I would get an early start on my New Year’s resolutions.

But much to my surprise, instead of thinking of positive steps to improve my life, I started fixating on the truly stupid things I have done in the past.

Right at the top of my list is promising a friend I would pick him up a tumble weed while driving through the West.

It was in the mid-nineties, and my two youngest daughters and I were headed from New Orleans to Boulder for my oldest daughter’s graduation from CU and her wedding, planned for the day after graduation (she always was an over-achiever).

Heading north through New Mexico we see these huge tumble weeds blowing across the road. It seemed the perfect time and place to make good on my promise, so I pulled over and sent one of the girls out to catch ‘the biggest one she could find.’

(Do cut me some slack here, because I had never been in the West before, and the closest I had ever been to a tumble weed was from the sofa when I was a kid, watching old black and white westerns on TV.)

The resulting ball of thorns filled half of my back seat. Neither of my daughters wanted to sit by it, so that became a running argument for the rest of the trip.

I never did get all the thorns out of my car, but my friend (who thought the whole thing was hilarious) still has the ‘weed.’ It has a place of honor in his home, and he decorates it every Christmas with ornaments and lights.

That same trip I detoured through Roswell, N.M. If I had given it any thought, I would have realized that Roswell is not where you want to go with two teen-aged sci-fi fanatics who would like nothing better than to be abducted to a mother ship by aliens.

I refused to spend the night in the town but while there they spent their entire budgets on over-priced bright green plastic figures of aliens and T-shirts.

Using my windshield washers while driving 70 MPH down an expressway in Illinois in January during a blizzard with the temperature about 20 below wasn’t exactly the smartest thing I ever did. I had to pull over to the shoulder of the expressway and scrape the ice off my windshield so I could see again, and then merge back into that 70 MPH traffic. It’s a wonder I wasn’t killed.

Telling my daughters about how some not too bright teenagers were dyeing their hair with Kool-aid was not a good thing. I should have known better.

Getting older has not necessarily resulted in my getting wiser.

A recent stupid thing was assuring my daughter that we didn’t need to get the dog neutered for another month because she was too young to get pregnant. Puppies anyone? We figure they should arrive within the next couple of weeks.