My magazines were replete with people who declared now that they had time, they were going to accomplish some great thing of which they had dreamt for most of their lives. Write a novel. Read all of the great Russian novels. Compose a symphony. Or just get out of bed before the sun passes over the yard arm.
I know myself too well to get sucked into that form of delusion. Instead, I took the opportunity to catch up on my reading. To my amazement, even that got a bit monotonous, and, instead, I gave into addictive behavior.
I started binge-watching on Netflix. I worked my way through the 10-seasons of Modern Family -- laughing hilariously for the first six seasons, and then watching with growing pain as the last four seasons petered out into self-parody. The path seemed far too familiar.
Even that has come to an end. Last week, I was flattened with another bout of what I had in early March when I returned from Oregon. Headache. Cough. Loss of taste and smell. Achy joints. Diarrhea. And severe fatigue. I slept for three full days at one point. The only difference this time was that I had absolutely no fever. Not a twinge.
In March, it took three weeks for me to shake whatever it was. My doctor gave me some medicine for the symptoms, and I pulled through. I saw her again yesterday, and she armed me with more drugs.
Out of necessity, I have confined myself to my bedroom. It is probably no more than a head cold, but I do not need to spread it to the people who come and go from my house.
Because I am too tired to read and not-at-all interested in any more screen entertainment, I have been looking through some envelopes of photographs I brought back with me on one of my trips north. I thought you might like to see some.
That photograph at the top is me. Even though it is almost fifty years old, it does sum up how I feel these days. A bit scruffy, but still willing to make my way in the world. I could be Pip or Huck or Jem.
I was none of them, though. I was just a simple country lad in law school trying to make sense of a confusing world.
Several years earlier, a younger version of me was still an undergraduate. During the summer of 1970, my friend John Crooks and I decided to visit Washington, DC to investigate for ourselves what we had been learning in our political science courses. I had scheduled several appointments with the various branches of government.
During the 1968 election, I had worked with a guy by the name of Dan (his last name having now been engulfed in the furnace of age) who had a job in the communications department of the White House. He showed us around the place.
Our next stop was Congress. I had known Mark Hatfield for years -- long before he became Oregon's senator. I knew that if I ever wanted to run for office (which I did), I would be true to the basic principles I shared with him. We had a long talk about that. How shared principles build respect, even when they lead individuals to different positions.
That wisdom appears to be lost in today's politics. And everyone is ready to blame other people for their own failings. I count myself among the lost.
But my favorite part of the trip was a visit to my then-favorite Supreme Court justice. Potter Stewart.
His name first came to my notice in his dissent from the 1962 decision in Engel v. Vitale -- one of the school prayer cases. His common sense reasoning persuaded me that my own position might need re-examining. Most people know him for his 1964 concurring opinion in Jacobellis v. Ohio, an obscenity case, "I know it when I see it."
Justice Stewart spent over an hour talking with John and me about the court's process. At the time, I had a dream of clerking for the court, and he gave me some encouraging hints.
But most of the time, we discussed why it was important for the court to avoid being seen as a political body. He pointed out that Felix Frankfurter refused to even vote in elections after he joined the court. It was not surprising then that Justice Stewart simply laughed and brushed off his inclusion in a list of men, in a 1967 Esquire article, who would make great presidents.
John shot a photograph of the justice and me. It was one of my prized possessions. But it appears to have disappeared in one of my moves. I am hoping it is amongst the photographs that once hung on my law office wall.
The last photograph is sandwiched in time between the two others. After I graduated from college, I knew I wanted to go on to law school. But I also wanted to get some life under my belt. So, I joined the Air Force.
I suspect that everyone who has ever been in the military understands the strange aspect of forming friendships while on duty. It may be the knowledge that time is short because we all soon will be moving off to other assignments. Or it may be that the intensity of the military experience also intensifies friendships.
I do not know for certain. I just know that the friendships I invested time in during my Air Force years have led to some of the strongest friendships I still have.
This photograph is evidence of that. The grouping is of me and my friends Dennis and Diane Dooley. Our mutual friend Robin Olson is behind the camera.
It was Memorial Day weekend of 1973. We had rented a ski boat at Castle AFB and Robin towed the boat with his pickup to a local lake (which also escapes my memory) where we camped. Between water skiing, eating some great campfire food, and sharing the tales of our limited life experience, we formed friendships that last to this day.
And that is how I am spending my day in my more restricted regime until my cold recedes. I was tempted at one point to start sorting the photographs for a far more grand project.
Instead, I will trickle some of my favorites to you as time goes by -- and I trust I do not. At least, not yet.
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