Things I Never Said Before
A Geezer’s Notebook, By Jim Foster
To know that we know what we know, and to know what we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge. – Copernicus
I did not know that – Foster
Don’t you wish you could say something so brilliant, so earthshakingly perceptive about today’s society, Earth’s future or its past, that your words will live forever and be quoted by the world’s great scientists and scholars until our sun finally explodes and we are no more?
Imagine saying or writing something so insightful, so shockingly intelligent that Donald Trump will claim your words as his own. Of course he won’t understand them and will screw them up, but he will try to steal your words anyway.
How many times have you listened as some world leader stated some great truth about the future of the world that you turned to your beloved and said, ‘What in hell does that mean? Is there any more wine?’
Wouldn’t you like to have said:
“‘More than any other time in human history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness; the other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.” – Woody Allen
Well, Woody may not be the best example of a world leader, but his words are a lot wiser that anything we have been getting from the US lately.
I haven’t written about my health for a long time, or maybe I did and have forgotten about it. That’s one of the joys of getting old; your memory gets a little spotty. You remember some minor things, but important stuff like your wife’s name or whether you closed the garage door often disappears.
This is true, we have a clicker thingie in the car that opens and closes the garage door. I automatically hit it when we are leaving or coming home. Last Friday, I pushed the thingie button as we were leaving but halfway down the street I couldn’t remember doing it. We were going out of town for a day or two and did I or didn’t I?
Two blocks from home I turned around and went back. The door was closed.
This is from a man who is planning to say something that will be quoted by scholars and scientists until the end of time. If I actually did come up with the most brilliant quote of all time, I would probably hit save on the computer and the garage door would open.
There are a bunch of guys from ODCI who meet for breakfast the first Friday of every month, not necessarily for the good fellowship and the exchange of memories but more to see whether we all made it through the month. One of the topics that almost always comes up is our bypass surgeries since we have all had one or two.
I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed, but old geezers who’ve had heart surgery are always yapping about it.
Back in the ‘80s everyone was having bypasses.
Of course surgery back in 1986 when I had my first one was a lot different than it is now. In fact the whole medical field was quite primitive in the ‘80s. There were no specialists. There was no such thing as an eye, nose, ears and throat doctor, or even a proctologist.
Your doctor was both. You were always worried what problem the patient ahead of you had. If you were going in with a sore throat, you just prayed you were his first patient of the day, or if you were the second it was whether she or he’d remembered to wash their hands.
Medicine was pretty hit and miss in the 80s. They didn’t have all the miracle drugs and pills to work with they have today. Penicillin was just in the experimental stage. It’s true that hundreds of people were walking the streets with moldy hot dog buns strapped to their arms, but it certainly wasn’t developed to the point where they could top up a syringe and stick it in your bum.
There were no such things as X-ray machines either. If a doctor wanted to know what was going on inside you they just stood you up in front of a window on a sunny day.
I got a big charge out of Bob Carroll, my dentist back in the 70s, he’d stick a lead blanket over my crotch before he took an x-ray of my teeth. Why didn’t dentists do that during my childbearing years?
Fortunately all those X-rays didn’t cause me any gene problems. My sons, Tim and Paul, are both doing OK. But Rufus, the two-headed boy is having a hell of a time getting a job.
(Image Supplied)
