The Pasadena Village. A community of seniors supporting each other as they age in their own homes

During the last month I’ve had a few very pleasant phone conversations with fellow villager, Dick Myers, which I enjoy mainly because Dick is a “muser”, he reflects at two or three levels beyond the obvious, the banal, the cliche. Our conversations reminded me that these viral isolation weeks are an opportunity to do something out of the ordinary with our brains: thinking about what we might think about. Usually, the beat of the day supplies the agenda for our minds, but until we get a vaccine we can experiment with self-chosen subject matter to challenge ourselves.

One of Dick’s musings I’ve chosen as our subject for May:
The Threads of Our Lives!

The genealogy, the geography, the historical era, the events, the parentage and familial characters, the institutions we were a part of, the formal and informal teachers, friends and acquaintances, the choices we made and the circumstances that led us to those choices, what we considered our crises, our losses, our beliefs: all of these and more bundled to create the individual with your name today.

When I enter a new situation in life I am usually asked to introduce myself. I find that as often as not I tell them what’s on my driver’s license and a pinch more, a teaser, but I hide or preserve what would fill a multi-volumed autobiography that would take me months to years of research and rethinking. Other members of the Village are writing their memoirs. I’ve talked to some of them, and inevitably they mention new discoveries, new insights, revisions of old saws they had used from the past.

Today, I want us to look back thru the maze, and tell us of something that still is an unfinished chapter or event, a choice you still find a mystery, a person you would like in your life still, a place that is still unfinished business, a talent or career that was an opportunity lost, a book or character which still echoes in dreams or a moment of reverie, unfinished matters of grief or visits to graves to say goodbye, loves or resentments that are unforgotten. Let’s spend the hour thinking about what we’d like to think about. Let’s take advantage of the space that the virus has offered.

John Tuite

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