Pete Rose and Kris Kristofferson died and for some reason I thought I’d write about them, one or the other. But I started down the Rose rabbit hole and finally decided that I didn’t really have much to say. He was a great ballplayer who gambled on his own team and got banned for life. Then he had to watch baseball get in bed with legalized gambling. But he broke the rule and that’s that. As for Kristofferson, he was a handsome man who wrote great songs and acted in movies. He was a fixture who swam in an out of the spotlight, but I never owned a single album of his and I only saw one or two of his movies.

Both men were older than I am now and are another reminder that the end comes to us all, good, bad, famous or not. And the lesson is coming hard and fast. I’m at that stage in my life when a lot of lights are winking out, people I knew, people I loved, people I’d only heard of. It’s pretty clear by now that the tolling bell is drawing near, although I’m still fairly active, and struck the ball reasonably well yesterday on the golf course. Best of all, my mental age, the age I act, still lags behind my physical age, although I imagine one day they’ll finally meet up.

Although, I have noticed a tendency of late to wonder about the decisions I’ve made in life, to see how these other people lived and wonder if I should have tried harder, been more relentless, sacrificed a bit for greatness. And I’ve also come to recognize that it matters what sort of parents you have, and what they’ve learned and what they’ve passed on. Because it never occurred to me that I could have been a Rhodes scholar. Heck, I didn’t think about college until my senior year. In the end, however, I did alright, but and there’s always but, I might have done better if I’d tried just a little harder. Or not. You never know.