Glad to be Home

There's nothing so sweet as the first glimpse of your home town after you have been away for a while. It was a long drive the past two days. Josh's concert went very well. They played some exciting music and the conductor is one of my favorite band composers. We left San Antonio around 6:15 after hiking back to his hotel and getting his stuff. Once we were about and hour and a half away, we stopped for food and I realized I didn't have my credit card. I realized at that moment that I had left it at the restaurant where I ate lunch. I still had my debit card so I could pay for our dinner, but I had intended to use the card for the hotel that night. So after picking up dinner I tried calling the restaurant to make sure they had my card, but I only got an answering machine. So then I called my brother to give me the 800 number for Bank of America so I could cancel the card just in case. I did that and then when I stopped for gas, I took money out of savings for the hotel. We arrived in Sweetwater around 11:00 last night, checked in and immediately went to bed. I slept fitfully. I kept hearing a lot of different sounds including something that sounding like some kind of drumming. Maybe it was my imagination. I woke up at 4:00 a.m. and couldn't fall back asleep right away. I eventually drifted off probably around 5:00 and slept for another hour and half. I got up at 6:45 and we were on the road by 7:00.

We stopped briefly for a coke but made it back home by 10:30. I had about 15 messages from the same local number that was a strange recording of their last name spelled out and a number. I had no idea who they were. I got in the shower as soon as I got home and got ready in record time for church. I went to Mass at 11:15 and afterwards I went to the store and got enough for supper tonight and a few lunches until pay day on Tuesday. I came home, made some lunch and then took a nap after finishing my book. I finally got Mitch Album's first book "Tuesdays with Morrie." It has a lot of profound wisdom that inspires me to look at my life a little more closely.

For one thing, I'm realizing even more that teaching is probably not my ultimate calling. I think I'm a good teacher, but I'm not a great one and I don't really want to be great. I hope I'm going in the right direction with library science. I still ultimately would love to work as a music librarian. But one step at a time. The book has a lot of great insights about life and how to live. Here's a passage that I am reflecting on right now.

"Mitch, I embrace aging."
Embrace it?
"It's very simple. As you grow, you learn more. If you stayed twenty-two, you'd always be as ignorant as you were at twenty-two. Aging is not just decay, you know. It's growth. It's more than the negative that you're going to die, it's also the positive that you understand you're going to die, and that you live a better life because of it."
Yes, I said, but if aging were so valuable, why do people always say, "Oh, if I were young again." You never hear people say, "I wish I were sixty-five."
He smiled. "You know what that reflects? Unsatisfied lives. Unfulfilled lives. Lives that haven't found meaning. Because if you've found meaning in your life, you don't want to go back. You want to go forward. You want to see more, do more. You can't wait until sixty-five."