Give Us This Day
A gray morning mood lightens at the sight of dogs on the beach
To hear the related 5-minute audio file that I uploaded today as my Morning Journal flash briefing for Alexa devices, please click on the play button:
Lightly Edited Transcript via AudioPen
Good morning. Today is Thursday, July 25th, Ocean Park.
I'm just leaving the cottage on a gray, soft day. There was a lot of fog when I first woke up. The fog is lifting. I'm not sure what I'm going to talk to you about. I'm just going to walk down the path through the dune here. I hope it's not too breezy that the wind won't be a problem in listening. We'll see what's going on out here on the beach.
Sometimes I get so busy here. I'm working on interviewing someone from Amazon and putting stuff together. As the summer reaches the halfway point between July and August, I think, well, have I really had time just to enjoy being at the beach? And anyway, I think some of it is aging.
I don't like to think I waste a lot of time worrying about when my life is going to be over. But when you get in your 70s, you talk to a friend in Wyoming and he's had a heart procedure that maybe saved his life and he's a year or two older than I am. It's not unrealistic to be reckoning with how much time you have left.
I talked to another friend yesterday sharing these thoughts, and we both agreed there's only one way to handle that kind of anxiety, and that's to live each day.
Today I'm tired. I was up in the night worrying about the trip to France and other things, probably two hours, just could not sleep, could not turn the mind off, tried all my tricks, meditated, listened to jazz playlist for sleep from Apple, and finally got to sleep around 4:30 and turned off the alarm that usually wakes me up at five. So today is a day when I'm tired, but I'm healthy and I'm surrounded by love of my daughters are here. My three grandsons were all going to have supper at the cottage tonight. Dermot and I are going to make some tacos and it's going to be wonderful to have everybody there. That's what today is. I don't know how many today's I have left, but I'm pretty sure this one could be pretty nice. It doesn't even matter if the sun comes out.
So we're out here now. This is the time when the dogs can be on the beach. There are dogs down there by the water and they're playing with their owners. I see Lynn down there with her golden retriever, and I don't recognize the dogs right in front of me. Usually Mike and Rue, my daughter and her husband, bring Finn down there, Bernadoodle, who loves being on the beach. As the tide is going out, I can see the rocks that are on the beach as I look toward the pier at Old Orchard Beach. The lifeguard towers with their red crosses on them are waiting for the lifeguards to show up. There's a big front end loader that has been out cleaning the beach. They keep this beach kind of manicured. That's different than the beaches in Sanibel, which are left to let nature do whatever changes it makes. I think you can hear a dog barking. I'll take a picture of the beach and put it up on the newsletter and hope you have a great day. However many days you have left.
You have left; I hope today is a good one.
Thanks for listening.