General Discussion

I was at the harbor with a few old guys hanging around and gabbing in Basque. They were kind enough to switch to Spanish for a foreigner (i.e. me). I can well imagine that if they had grown used to a life where scrimping and working were no longer natural. Just a different rhythm to things there.

My younger daughter is a hotshot lawyer working out of Frankfurt. Like me, she is in a different country almost every day. That's a different rhythm than most people choose, too. Like me, she just slid into her world, and there she stayed. She somehow manages to raise her two daughters with her man, who travels as much as she does, and a woman from Poland whom they have hired to help them out with the children. Their girls, now 4 and 7, are comfortable in English and German, know some Polish as well. My daughter has gone off to a different planet, celebrating important birthdays in the Maldives and in Oman, and goes down to visit friends in Zanzibar for the weekend. There are all sorts of planes of existence out there, and I came to realize long ago that there were plenty that I would never get to experience, hers being one of them. But it's OK. I never aspired to her level, and never will. Like the man in the story, I let my expectations settle down to the level of what I have (like I have much of a choice at age 73), instead of getting frustrated at having expectations I will never fulfill.