Jim Cunningham

We learn from experience that we never learn from experience.
— Bernard Shaw

“I remember the first time I … (fill in the blank).”
How many times have you heard a nearly-normal person start off a conversation or inject out of the blue with those every words? Bunches, I bet.
I think it is grand, too. That a body will regress and let you know exactly when was the first time they happened to experience an experience for the first time. The very first time.

I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than to be crowded on a velvet cushion.
  Thoreau

Prior to the Dr. Deb, the dog doctor, and I getting married I was single. So it wasn’t uncommon for me to be alone. All alone. Quite often. Spending a great deal of time with just my ownself.
Good company.
What I’d do back then in the days before the joint checking account would be to tank up (the motor car) and take out. Travel new trails.

On the morning of Tuesday, January 17 in the year of 20 and 12, I decided to become a songwriter.
Since I’m retired, I’ve the got time. And possess a smidgen of rhythm and a semi-sound mind. And to rhyme.
Not just any old kind of songsmith, but a composer of country and western ditties.
Why would I take up such a vocation this late in life? Why for the money. Big bucks. Something you don’t make toiling in the newspaper business. Believe me, that is one statement in print you can believe.

Sixty years ago I knew everything: now I know nothing; education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.
  Will Durant

My 50th high school class reunion is coming up this year.
So this equates out to the figuring that it has been a half-century since I was diploma-ed. From being a naïve teen with impossible dreams to aging into an old curmudgeon entertaining unwelcomed nightmares in his sunset years.
I concede that in the interim I haven’t progressed very far.

If you think civilized people no longer take advantage of the weak and unprotected, just look at the names they give to helpless infants.
 Anon

Nearly normal folks my age and older can recall a couple of TV shows hosted by Art Linkletter. From back in the 19 and 50s and 60s.
One was called “People Are Funny.” And I have never been one to argue with that. The other show was “Kids Say the Darndest Things.” I concur with that also.
Nowadays it’s the reality shows that draw in the ratings.

It’s not the gift that counts; it’s the thought.
‑ A Dumb Saying

If you’re a nephew or a niece it’s likely that you have an “Aunt.” Possibly a number of aunts. But there is always that one “Aunt.”
Considered by the family as being a bit daft. A shade touched. Or eccentric. Out on a distant limb in the family tree.
I’m reminded of my Aunt Earle. My pappy’s sister. She married a Christian fellow that farmed. The blacklands up in Falls County. Cotton and corn were the crops that he banked on.

If ever I have failed to tell you about my culinary skills … well, I’m telling you now.
And I’ll attempt to employ as much modesty as possible in relating my expertise with stovetop dishes and cast iron skillets and even pushing the buttons on an 80-dollar microwave oven.
Now I did not possess this talent of preparing cornbread and beans and chili overnight. I did not. It took years and years of adding a dash of this and a dab of that before my dishes developed the sapidity capable of making your teeth white, your skin tight, and childbirth a pleasure.

News is anything that causes a woman to say, “My goodness!”
 --Mark Twain
It bothers me that it even bothers me.
That I’m bothered by being bothered. But I am bothered. Albeit, not enuff to break into a sweat. However, I am indeed, bothered.
Especially when it comes to perusing the ‘zines (magazines) and rags (newspapers).

Life is a misadventure that we terminate on the shoulders of six strange men whose only objective is to make a hole in one with you. — Fred Allen

They say death and taxes are a given. Not so.
‘Cause you can evade taxes. Or try. But you can’t avoid death. Not even if you try. Cryogenically, even.
And that’s life. Or the way it is.

“One of the wisest things my daddy ever taught me was that “so-and-so is a damned smart man, but the fool’s got no sense.”
 —Lyndon B. Johnson

It’s been my belief that if you want to hear everything, you need to keep both eyes open.