Is life what you make of it, or are you what life makes of you?

Life sure has its twists and turns, doesn’t it?

I dropped by to visit with my friend Carol when I noticed she was out in her front yard planting petunias this afternoon. Since she’s on a heavily traveled through street, I drive past her house several times each week when I’m headed to or returning from downtown. Lately, I’ve been wondering if she even still lived there. Her house is usually dark, the garage door is closed, the shades are drawn, the lights within, if any, are always very low. Dropping by at Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Easter, May Day, or her birthday can be an interesting experience! On top of that, she does often talk of moving on elsewhere, so I was beginning to wonder when I finally saw her at last.

Carol explained that she had returned from a trip down south, somewhere down in Texas – I didn’t quite catch if it was Dallas-Ft. Worth or if it was closer to Houston. Either way, she went to see some type of concert of performance. I didn’t catch the name, and I didn’t ask who the performer was. I presume if it really mattered she’d make quite a point of letting me know who it was! She did tell me the hotel where the concert was also happened to be quite exorbitant, so she found somewhere else nearby that was a bit more reasonable. No idea have I which hotel it is, but whatever one she checked into, apparently she was very fortunate because she was either the nth person to check in there (hundred thousandth, millionth, etc.) or she was otherwise randomly chosen to be the ‘guest of the day’. She was given her room key card, for room 1207. Come to find out, the elevator only listed eleven floors on the button board and floor indicator. Carol figured out at that point her accommodations were going to be in the penthouse. Either it cost her nothing additional, or it may have even been that her entire stay was ‘on the house’. On the way down there and back, Carol also tells me she had great flights and the airlines were functioning very, very smoothly for her. Considering that the customer satisfaction for the airlines right now is the lowest it’s been since 2001, that’s really saying something!

I’m thinking of all the very fortunate things I’ve happened into through the years. Most have been amazing opportunities, and I’ve lucked into chances to purchase some very nice things for extraordinarily low prices. Sometimes deals come along where you see them and you know that if you walk away to think about it for a while, it just ain’t gonna’ be there when you come back!

But life isn’t all roses, naturally. A few days back, a twenty eight year old black man was stabbed to death in a bar brawl in the next county seat east of here, about thirty miles away. As it turns out, he’d recently moved from Chicago because he wanted to be away from the dangers of the big city life. He escaped the gangs and ghettos of Chicagoland only to die in a bar in Charles City, Iowa, which has long billed itself as ‘America’s Hometown’.

I read in the Des Moines register today that down in Colfax, which I believe is south-southeast of where I live, that a man was killed over the weekend when he put his motorcycle in a ditch. He entered a curve too fast, went into the ditch, was thrown, and didn’t survive the impact. The article did point out that he was wearing a helmet.

An article in one of the papers I read each day discussed fatality rates of young people who do not wear their seatbelts. Something on the order of sixty percent plus of youths killed in car wrecks were not wearing seatbelts. That means that just under forty percent who die in automobiles are buckled in.

I’ve been saying it for years: THERE ARE NO GUARANTEES IN LIFE!

Enjoy life while you've got it because you never know what may come next,

the TiGor