Neil Jones News Not Good

Warren Sparrow forwarded this email he received from Holly Jones, Neil's daughter dated May 28, 2016:


Dear Central High Grads,

Dad has taken a turn for the worse. He is currently in the hospital in Monroe experiencing kidney and liver failure. He is very fragile and is experiencing cognitive difficulty.

Please keep him in your prayers. He loves you all. When I told him about the email last week, he was very grateful.

Be well loyal friends,

Holly


Let's all keep Neil in our prayers.

-Ed

Memorial Day

This Memorial Day Holiday  is meant to remind Americans to honor their military heroes, many of them who "sacrificed all" for their country.

But I don't believe most of our generation need "reminding.  Out tender, formative years were during World War Two...when most men we ever saw were wearing uniforms, including our fathers, if we were lucky enough to see them during furloughs.

Charles Mateer  1954

Personally, I'm "reminded" almost every day; especially on this day, May 30.  That was the day in 1961 when my cousin, best friend, and classmate, Charles Mateer was killed fighting for our country in Laos.

Rest in Peace, Charles.

And my God Bless America.  

Soon.

Ed Myers, Kathryn Myers, Charles Mateer  1942

We who are left, how shall we look again

Happily on the sun or feel the rain

Without remembering how they who went

Ungrudgingly and spent

Their lives for us loved, too the sun and rain?

-Wilfred Wilson Gibson

-Ed

FIRST PLACE !

Car that Don Bought

Perhaps you've been following the saga about that 1952 Pontiac Chieftain, which was a carbon copy of my Dad's car that Don Nance's boys restored to its original appearance the day it rolled off the factory in Detroit.

What an accomplishment! What craftsmanship!


And they were rewarded a week or so ago by placing NUMBER

ONE ...FIRST PLACE!  in a major antique car show in Burlington, NC!  And that's about as easy as making a hole in one....the first time you ever hit a golf ball!

The judges inspect EVERYTHING on the car....including the screws...to make sure they are factory original....and the paint to determine if it's also the same as was when it originally left the factory.

Big Don and Little Don with NUMBER ONE  plaque and "Lazarus"

But Donny, Tommy, their friend Ricky Holmes and the rest of the Nance Boys did it!

The reason that old car was so special to Don and me, was because we spent so much time riding around in it.  We "double dated" in it a number of times, but mostly just "drove around....looking to impress the girls.  (We never did, but we sure enjoyed driving that thing.)

The first thought that came to my mind when I saw pictures of what that car looked like when Don first bought it a number a years ago...and what it looked like when his boys got through with it....was the old cliche, "From a sow's ear..to a gold purse."  I suggested to Don that he ought to name it "Gold Purse"...or something like that.

He said the boys had already named it, "Lazarus."  

Of course. I almost forgot........ they're the sons of a preacher man!

-Ed

The Nance Gang.   Don said EVERYONE chipped in.

Proud Parents.   Don and Letty

Don't Leave Home Without It

An American Express Card ?

No.

Your gun....or maybe a can of Mace.

That's the advice R,L. Clark is getting these days.

And the reason:

R.L.'s Backyard Visitor

Or......at least a "Free Bear Zone" sign.

-Ed

Higher Education

A good friend of mine called to tell me that her daughter was just offered a FULL scholarship to UCLA.

Full scholarship....PLUS $6,000 a year for expenses!

Wow!

I congratulated her on her obviously brilliant, hard studying daughter!'

"Hard studying my Pootie," replied my friend.  " Her scholarship is for............ Vollyball."


(I did NOT make this up!   -Ed)

Defragging

I do that about once a week for my computer (PC).

I also do it for my brain.  The way I do that is with astronomy.  All I have to do is read about a half of page about "outer space and the stars and..." and my mind immediately starts to "boggle." It only takes about 5 minutes of this and, "voila," the mental defrag is complete.

"Pillars of Creation"

Like just about everything else, the news is both good and bad.

For example, today I discoverded that the PILLARS OF CREATION....no longer exist.

Darn!

The Hubble telescope dscovered and photographed them in 1995 and they've been an inspiration to millions since then. 

And now, they're gone.

But the good news is that the "experts" didn't expect them to last very long anyway.  If there had been a photograph taken of Earth...from the PILLARS OF CREATION....we wouldn't exist either.


You see, the "Pillars" are 7,000 light years away from Earth. The picture that Hubble took is what the "Pillars of Creation" looked like in the year 4985 BC.  The mythical picture taken of the Earth would have shown it...also as it looked in 4985 BC.

The Astronomy article on the Internet explained that,

. "We see the Sun as it looked 8.5 minutes ago. If you were standing one foot in front of me, I would see you as you looked 1.01670336 nanoseconds ago, which is the time it would take for the light to reflect from your face to my pupil. While our brains live in their present, we see everything else in its past tense."

Are you "boggled" yet?

-Ed


"Time is an illusion"

-Albert Einstein

(The Pillars are a combination of dust and gas which combine to eventually form new stars)

Rubber Room Time

Watching this country go insane....just breaks my heart.
It's getting close to sending me "around the bend" too.

The fact that the American People haven't stormed the Washington Establishment with pitchforks yet, tells me that they never will.

You don't hear the old expression, "The American People won't stand for it"  because apparently they will stand for anything.

Boys in the girls bathrooms, Girls in the boys bathrooms?

Insane

Or deliberate further destruction of the once greatest nation on earth.

Sad.

-Ed

World's Oldest Person Passes

Susannah Jones

According to CNN, Susannah Mushatt Jones, the world's oldest person, died in New York city Thursday night.

 She was 116.

Jones was born on July 6, 1899, in Lowndes County, Alabama, and her life spanned three centuries,  Her father was a sharecropper who supported his family by picking cotton.

She lived through 20 U.S. presidents, two world wars and the birth of the automobile, the airplane, TV and the Internet.

Jones attributed her longevity to sleep, clean living and positive energy.

*****************

Which reminded me of one of my favorite stories about a TV reporter, years ago, who was sent to interview a 100 year old man. 

He inquired of the man what his secret to living so long was.

"I never smoked....never cussed....fooled around with wild women...and, most importantly, never touched a drop of alcohol!

Suddenly, there was this loud crash.....from somewhere in the back of the house.

The reporter stopped his camera...and said..."What the Heck was that!"

The old man sheepishly replied, 

"Oh, I'm so embarrassed!  it's my father. He's drunk again!"

The Joy of Old Age

(This was an article in the New York Times by Oliver Sacks on July 6, 2013

Oliver Wolf Sacks, CBE, FRCP was a British neurologist, naturalist and author who spent his professional life in the United States. He believed that the brain is the "most incredible thing in the universe" and therefore important to study. WikipediBorn: July 9, 1933, Willesden, London, United KingdomDied: August 30, 2015, Manhattan, New York City, NY

LAST night I dreamed about mercury — huge, shining globules of quicksilver rising and falling. Mercury is element number 80, and my dream is a reminder that on Tuesday, I will be 80 myself.

Elements and birthdays have been intertwined for me since boyhood, when I learned about atomic numbers. At 11, I could say “I am sodium” (Element 11), and now at 79, I am gold. A few years ago, when I gave a friend a bottle of mercury for his 80th birthday — a special bottle that could neither leak nor break — he gave me a peculiar look, but later sent me a charming letter in which he joked, “I take a little every morning for my health.”

Eighty! I can hardly believe it. I often feel that life is about to begin, only to realize it is almost over. My mother was the 16th of 18 children; I was the youngest of her four sons, and almost the youngest of the vast cousinhood on her side of the family. I was always the youngest boy in my class at high school. I have retained this feeling of being the youngest, even though now I am almost the oldest person I know.

I thought I would die at 41, when I had a bad fall and broke a leg while mountaineering alone. I splinted the leg as best I could and started to lever myself down the mountain, clumsily, with my arms. In the long hours that followed, I was assailed by memories, both good and bad. Most were in a mode of gratitude — gratitude for what I had been given by others, gratitude, too, that I had been able to give something back. “Awakenings” had been published the previous year.

At nearly 80, with a scattering of medical and surgical problems, none disabling, I feel glad to be alive — “I’m glad I’m not dead!” sometimes bursts out of me when the weather is perfect. (This is in contrast to a story I heard from a friend who, walking with Samuel Beckett in Paris on a perfect spring morning, said to him, “Doesn’t a day like this make you glad to be alive?” to which Beckett answered, “I wouldn’t go as far as that.”) I am grateful that I have experienced many things — some wonderful, some horrible — and that I have been able to write a dozen books, to receive innumerable letters from friends, colleagues and readers, and to enjoy what Nathaniel Hawthorne called “an intercourse with the world.”

I am sorry I have wasted (and still waste) so much time; I am sorry to be as agonizingly shy at 80 as I was at 20; I am sorry that I speak no languages but my mother tongue and that I have not traveled or experienced other cultures as widely as I should have done.

I feel I should be trying to complete my life, whatever “completing a life” means. Some of my patients in their 90s or 100s say nunc dimittis — “I have had a full life, and now I am ready to go.” For some of them, this means going to heaven — it is always heaven rather than hell, though Samuel Johnson and James Boswell both quaked at the thought of going to hell and got furious with David Hume, who entertained no such beliefs. I have no belief in (or desire for) any post-mortem existence, other than in the memories of friends and the hope that some of my books may still “speak” to people after my death.

W. H. Auden often told me he thought he would live to 80 and then “bugger off” (he lived only to 67). Though it is 40 years since his death, I often dream of him, and of my parents and of former patients — all long gone but loved and important in my life.

At 80, the specter of dementia or stroke looms. A third of one’s contemporaries are dead, and many more, with profound mental or physical damage, are trapped in a tragic and minimal existence. At 80 the marks of decay are all too visible. One’s reactions are a little slower, names more frequently elude one, and one’s energies must be husbanded, but even so, one may often feel full of energy and life and not at all “old.” Perhaps, with luck, I will make it, more or less intact, for another few years and be granted the liberty to continue to love and work, the two most important things, Freud insisted, in life.

When my time comes, I hope I can die in harness, as Francis Crick did. When he was told that his colon cancer had returned, at first he said nothing; he simply looked into the distance for a minute and then resumed his previous train of thought. When pressed about his diagnosis a few weeks later, he said, “Whatever has a beginning must have an ending.” When he died, at 88, he was still fully engaged in his most creative work.

My father, who lived to 94, often said that the 80s had been one of the most enjoyable decades of his life. He felt, as I begin to feel, not a shrinking but an enlargement of mental life and perspective. One has had a long experience of life, not only one’s own life, but others’, too. One has seen triumphs and tragedies, booms and busts, revolutions and wars, great achievements and deep ambiguities, too. One has seen grand theories rise, only to be toppled by stubborn facts. One is more conscious of transience and, perhaps, of beauty. At 80, one can take a long view and have a vivid, lived sense of history not possible at an earlier age. I can imagine, feel in my bones, what a century is like, which I could not do when I was 40 or 60. I do not think of old age as an ever grimmer time that one must somehow endure and make the best of, but as a time of leisure and freedom, freed from the factitious urgencies of earlier days, free to explore whatever I wish, and to bind the thoughts and feelings of a lifetime together.

I am looking forward to being 80.

May LDL

Typical LDL at Jimmies

It's true!  It's hard to believe, but it's again time!

This month's "LDL" (Let's do lunch) will be held on

Tuesday, May 10, 2016, 11:30 AM

at "Jimmies" Restaurant in Mint Hill.

We're sending you this personal invitation to join in.  We'd like to see you.  Help us spread the word! Invite other classmates to come! Even better, bring someone with you! Just be sure YOU, come!

-Jerry 

Put the Third Finger of Your Right Hand...

....on the letter L...and the first finger of your left one the letter F.  Keep that position while you "hunt and peck" punching the "found key" with whichever finger is closest to it.

It took my Mom less than 2 minutes to explain that to me, but it turned out to be one of the most useful lessons I ever had. I was perhaps 14 years old at the time, and never again typed with only 2 fingers.  I wish I had absorbed more of her advice with such determinaton.

I "hunted and pecked" a lot after that, but with ALL of my fingers, instead of just two. And almost before I knew what a "Touch Typist" was.....I was one.

And seldom has a day gone by since then that I have not used that skill.
What a Mom!  I would say she was perfect.......except for one thing; she never did buy me that pony.

-Ed