Wilderness Blues- Ramblings from the Great Land

  I saw a T-shirt with this saying the other day. It kind of sums up how I feel some days. I know that I'm 70, and I feel like I'm 80, and I probably look like I'm 90 but I have a hard time wrapping my mind around the fact that I'm an odd, old fart. I don't know how it happened, except that I wake up every day and the calendar has changed. I go in and do my thing in the morning,  and look in the mirror and wonder who the hell is staring back at me. The hair on top of my head is getting pretty thin, but the hair on my ears and eyebrows is as thick as a briar patch. I have to keep my eyebrows trimmed to keep them from poking me in the eye when I 'm driving. The ear hair just looks plain ridiculous. What is the purpose of it? Women don't have ear hair. I think my ears and nose are growing too. I remember seeing old guys when I was a kid and they kind of looked like Dumbo. Just having bigger ears doesn't mean you can hear better. It might be all the hair clo...

This is my friend Jack Annis. I'm not sure he would approve of my writing about him- he's a fairly private person, but then again, he might not mind. He's incredibly generous with his time and talents and even his possessions. When he moved away last year he went out of his way to make sure that everything in our house was up to par- the electrical, hot water heater and plumbing. He had worked as the maintenence supervisor at the school and there wasn't a whole lot that he couldn't do. Actually this blog isn't about Jack, he's just the only person I have a picture of who is getting grey, so he fits the bill for what I wanted to write about. I do have a rather funny story involving Jack, two Sitka Blacktail bucks and a rubber life raft that I would like to share some day, but that will probably wait until another time. I was in Juneau awhile back to take care of some overdue maintenence on my body. I went to the dentist and had two teeth filled and one root c...