Looking back over the years of my life, I am struck by the lack of wisdom that followed me into adulthood.

What would I do differently if I knew then what I know now?

I would certainly not have delayed going back to school. Adding it up, and percentages are one math function that has stayed with me, I have been in school 35% of my lifetime. But now I find that my processes are slow and my discipline fleeting. Papers that may have taken a couple of weeks to research and write now take eight weeks (fortunately, the eight weeks are allotted for this activity, not because the other students are my age but because they all have full-time positions outside the home).

I would not have taken myself so seriously. It is embarrassing to think back at some of the confrontations I began or continued because I was stubborn when in reality not much many of these were worth the effort or consequence.

I would have stepped back and concluded "Such is life" more often than I did, if I ever did.

I would have traveled earlier and not waited until I had saved the time and money.

I would have kept a few of my jobs longer and quit others sooner.

I would have learned a second language. And been 'gooder' at English.

And that's what I'm thinking about.

Is it too very selfish to pray that your hair stylist will recover quickly from kidney stones because you need a hair cut?

Oh!

I kind of thought so.

Peripheral vision alerted me to the movement. Turning my head and looking outside the window I saw it. The first leaf of Fall floating slowly to the ground.

I looked beyond the tree in our front yard and observed the tree in the neighbor's. A few errant leaves were already atop her grass.

Yet the saddest thing is that the neighbor has children.

I have never seen the little girl from that house sitting out under that tree. No doll bed set up for her pretend family; no lemonade stand for thirsty dog walkers; no blanket upon which she could lay on her back and read or discover cloud creations.

Growing up I had a mulberry tree in the side yard of our house. The branches fell all the way to the ground making a secret drapery of leaves and juicy fruit. Between the mulberry and the catalpa tree I could string a line and throw my brother's pup tent over. Summer's were spent in long lazy days of delightful imagination, through books and made-up adventures.

"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Anatole France

And that's what I think about it.

The soccer coach is livid. His varsity team is lazy and unmotivated...his words. And so tonight, in about an hour and a half, he will start the reserved team. Oh my!

That is a no-win dilemma for my two freshmen grand daughters who will start. The varsity players will be angry at them...since teenagers rarely take responsibility for their own actions and the parents too, like somehow this is the junior varsity's fault that the varsity is sitting on the bench. If they lose, well, no one is happy including the players who took the field.

Best scenario? The reserves start and gain a 2-0 lead over the opposing team. At half-time the coach puts the varsity in and the game ends with a 3-0 shut-out.

I'll finish this post after the game.

Days later:

So the coach was more interested in winning than making a point and started the varsity. At 6-0 he let the reserves play. The game ended 7-2.

I was so hoping to end this post with a moral. But I can't think of a good one from this scenario.

That's what I'm thinking about.

The Nina and Santa Maria, replicas of course, were in the area over the weekend.

Coercing two high school freshmen, who are also grand daughters, to go with us, we drove the short half hour to the river town on the Ohio where the ships were moored.

Tiny little things they were.

Like Disney rides in Pirates Cove; from a distance they looked like the two-quarter rides for kids on the sidewalks outside of grocery stores. Or like part of a backyard play set for children.

One of the original ones that Columbus sailed, survived a hurricane at sea. One carried 120 passengers. I counted fifty of us yesterday who were crowded unto the deck. Claustrophobia started to set in. I read that it took over a month to get from Portugal to Hispaniola. A month crammed into quarters that today would hold...five people maybe ten.

Columbus' dream of finding a way to the orient by sailing west was not shared by many. It took seven long years for him to gain enough support to start his journey. And even then he did not get to the orient by sailing west but discovered a New World.

Hurrah for Columbus.

Here's what I think about this. People today have dreams but we live in a society that sometimes does not value one person's dream. We discount what we do not share and laugh at those who against all reason think outside the box. Pressure from without mounts and sometimes overcomes the dreamer and that dream is put aside, trampled or stuffed deep inside in order for the dreamer to 'fit in' and be considered 'normal' and sometimes in order for friends and family members not to be embarrassed.

I wonder what we have lost by not encouraging outrageous dreams.

And that's what I think about it.

Spent the weekend with my grand daughter at her college. Seven hours of driving, we must have passed a couple dozen colleges much closer to home but as she put it, " I stepped foot on campus and knew it was the place for me."

As it was the place for her mother and aunt decades ago.

As it was the place for her grandmother half a century ago.

Much has changed since I was an undergraduate student. The freshmen no longer have to wear those insipid little beanies during freshmen week. The cafeteria is a buffet of different foods, open most of the day, eat all you care to for one price, which is included in the board. They've moved and improved the tennis courts, built a science building, a fine arts building and painted the bleachers. The post office is new yet in these days of cell phone communication hardly anyone checks the post office twice a day for mail like we did.

Yet somethings have not changed. Humanities is still one of the toughest courses taught, grits are still on the menu (and may in fact be the same batch of grits uneaten from the 60s), the athletic fields still have sink holes that appear by surprise, the hill to the cafeteria is still brutal for the legs and lungs, and college kids, for all their maturity, continue to get homesick (yes, the same home that many of them could not wait to leave).

It was a good time. So good that I'm going back next week, yes driving the seven hours, to see another soccer game. And hug my favorite college freshmen.

And that's what I'm thinking about today.

The average age of the world’s great civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through the following sequence...from bondage to spiritual faith...from spiritual faith to courage...from courage to liberty...from liberty to abundance...from abundance to selfishness...from selfishness to complacency…from complacency to apathy...from apathy to dependency...from dependency back to bondage.

Attributed to an 18th Century Scottish writer

Just spent the morning with a friend whose husband was having a biopsy at a local hospital.

A dozen people showed up to lend support for the couple and we crammed ourselves into the tiny, drab surgical waiting area. Of that twelve, at least ten had experienced some sort of health crisis which required medical intervention. Surgery, reconstruction, biopsy, replacement, chemotherapy, bunions, the group had pretty much tasted all of the medical specialties, with the exception of pediatrics, in the past year or so.

Each encounter seemed to place a mantle of expertise over the one having had the ailment. Each was an expert on doctors, nurses, drugs and hospital procedures. And while our mutual friend laid there trying to keep up a brave front, which I think he was able to do by simply ignoring most of the chatter, his friends recounted every ache and pain and treatment option for their own situation. At each telling the stories became more and more dire. It was a wonder, there at the end, that any one of the twelve was still breathing.

It was fascinating...not.

OK, it was a little fascinating. I was appalled and curious at the same time regarding what possible excuse people could give for this type of conversation in a hospital room in front of a patient. Was it to show that they too had suffered, perhaps more than the current patient could even dream of? Was it one-ups-manship or that ability to have a worse malady and a more consequential outcome than anyone else? I do not know.

My friend and I will laugh about that some day. And that's what I'm thinking about.

This week I had one friend leave for Afghanistan, trying to get into the country between the elections and any aftermath of those elections and another friend being deployed to Baghdad.

I am sad and a little concerned.

Both are dedicated to their callings, one to the military; the other to an NGO (non-governmental organization).

Both are independent, competent women who are able to take care of themselves...under normal circumstances. But Iraq and Afghanistan are not 'normal circumstance' kind of countries.

And so I am sad and a little concerned.

And that's what I'm thinking about today.