I wanted to call this 'All hat 'n no cattle' but, as is often the case when my fingers do the walking, this posting took a different turn....

T’day ain’t really been a good day…’n truth to tell, it ain’t been what I’d call a really good week so whatever I manage to put down here in this little espistle prob’ly won’t ever see the light of day…that’s alright…might not see the dark of nite either…. Anyhow, like most other people who manage to make it into their dotage, I make it a habit to read the obits, not only here in the Sac papers but back home as well ’n truth be told, I pay more attention to the hometown papers than I do here in norCal because that’s where I get the news about my oldest ’n dearest friends... Me ’n my peers are getting older, seems like sometimes, by the minnit…’n they just keep on dying…one or two, now ’n then, all adds up, y’know….same thing for She who must be obeyed…just one of the perils of aging… Thing is, we all gotta go ’n someday, it’ll be my turn…’course, when that day comes, it’s gonna necessarily be someone else reading my obit…well, that’s my guess anyhow….I really don’t know… My friend, Marvin, sez he just wants to wake up dead some morning…’n it just might be that when we die, why we just naturally come fully awake for the first time in our lives ’n maybe, just maybe, we’ll get to read our own obits….just gotta hope whoever writes ‘em will be kind… When my friends go, I confess, it saddens me a bit but since I’m expecting it anyway, the biggest surprise is in finding out who it wuz this time… There’s a line in one of my fav’rit songs that goes…”as the days dwindle down to a precious few…” makes me think ever’ time one of us dies, the rest of us get t’be ‘the precious few’ ’n that in itself ‘ud be embarrassing ‘cept I got so old I don’t really get embarrassed by much of anything anymore…. ANYHOW…because it’s kind’a suspected, it ain’t my friends passing that saddens me so, nuh-uh! It’s when one of their children goes ’n though, as the old preacher use’ta say, none of us knows what lies beyond, so the young that pass go into the same unknown that the rest of us are bound for…what really saddens me when the young are called is the overwhelming grief of the parent left behind…. There are no words of comfort, no healing act of mercy, nothing that we can say or do at such a time….while it’s a fact that parents lose children, it just seems wrong that a parent should outlive any of their children…it just seems so very, very wrong!