Sorry for being MIA. This week, two MM Bare Minimum Guide to Life posts, among others. See you Monday night

I’m working on MM’s Bare Minimum Guide to Life #5, and it’s taking a little more research than expected. So until tomorrow

There are parts of my job that do provide some insight on human nature, which is a positive part of it.

On Friday I spoke to an 82 year old man for a few hours. His aunt left a will that named 14 people, and if none of them are alive at the time the money distributes, it goes to their children. If any of those kids are dead, then to their kids, and so on. The lady is 95 years old, and the will was written in the 50s, so several of her siblings (6 total) are dead. Some of those siblings had 6 and 7 kids of their own, and some of them are dead. What I am getting at is that there are about 60 people who will end up taking money from this woman’s estate.

As he outlined the family tree, he told me bits and pieces of the stories of each person. So many of them had been married three and four times; another group refused to speak to each other. Others had lost businesses, gone to jail, gotten sick, died young. There are decades-old jealousies and, I suppose like everyone’s family, there is always some current drama going on.

I really enjoyed talking to him. He was so patient. It seems that people in their 80s and 90s are so peaceful. Every pretension is gone, and they finally have carved out their little niche. When we got to his mother and her descendants, he explained that he had never had kids because he was 73 when he first married. She was his high school girlfriend, but had married someone else. When the husband died, they married, and they had seven years together before she died.

Of course it’s easy to hear stories like that when it involves someone else. But when it’s happening to you, it’s entirely different.

I giggled at his use of the word ”prolific” to describe his Uncle Claude, a hugely fat man, married four times, with eight children. But that was someone real, and those are choies that he actually made, and the information is public. Or the cousin who went to jail, the ones who lost businesses, etc. In the brief description he could give me of these people, their entire existence could be summed up in a few choice anecdotes, many of them not entirely positive.

And I thought about the call all weekend. The amount of time and effort that must be expended to overcome the hopes and fears of youth, and to just… be… seems insurmountable. I want the sense of quiet that he exuded.

But more, it got me thinking about how a life can be summed up in a couple of highlights (or lowlights, in the case of some of his descriptions). What will my highlights be? I don’t care so much because I want to be remembered a certain way, but because I am genuinely curious to see where it’s going. I guess the thing I’m constantly railing about on here is that I want to direct it, rather than let it run its course, but I suppose there are enough cliches out there about planning that I don’t need to go into it here.

I like to hear these stories, but sometimes it makes me feel so far away from my own. I suppose that’s because as the life story happens, it doesn’t benefit from the detachment that happens when the story is told later. But then other times, like today, sprawled out on a rock in the mountains, I laid there and felt like I was really present in myself. I like those moments, and based on what I see at work, I’m looking forward to more of them as I get older.