When I grow
up…ok…retire…there are three books I want to write:
1 – On Fame
·
I
want to interview famous people to ask them what it means to be famous
o
Is
it what they always wanted?
o
Was
it worth it?
o
What
do they wish they had done differently?
o
What
advice would they give to someone they see whose fame is continuing to grow,
maybe too fast?
o
Do
they miss anonymity?
o
Does
the idea of their fame decreasing scare them?
o
How
has it impacted the people they knew before they got famous?
·
And
I want to interview:
o
the
uber-famous, from ex-Presidents to Taylor Swift (!) to Michael Jordan
o
the
medium famous – the D-listers
o
the
once famous who are no more
o
the
15 minutes of famesters,
…for all of whom
there’d be different kinds of questions.
2 –
Aphorisms/Truisms
·
What
are the basic things we should all know – from:
o
the best known – the key to real estate is
locationlocationlocation to
o
that
calculation on how to invest as you age – the % in stocks vs bonds vs cash
based on your age to
o
cooking
basics to
o
sports
(oddly, I can’t think of any right now!) to
o
gardening
(the corn should be high as an elephants eye by sometimeorother)
·
The
simpler the better
·
I
think I’d call it How to think like a Middle Aged Man at any age…or…What ya
wanna do is!
3 – Your kid
knows more than you ever will: What kids know and are trying to tell us when we
don’t want to listen
·
I
was talking after a memorial service this past weekend with a married couple I have
known and been close to for nearly 20 years about a message in the service
about that “thin line” between the physical world and the spiritual one and we got around to talking about the gifts children seem to have crossing back and forth over that line, which more likely isn't even a line at all. They
told me a very personal story about something their son said to them when he
was just 2 or 3 years old. The boy’s mom described how many years ago, she had suffered a
miscarriage at a very, very early point in her pregnancy and although there was
absolutely no way their young son could have known about it, in a car ride a
day or two later, their son started talking matter-of-factly about his sister who had just died.
·
Similarly,
how Trev named Emma the day Cheryl found out she was pregnant by pointing at
Cheryl’s belly and saying Emma in there!
·
And
there are so many similar stories I’ve heard that indicate that our children
are trying to tell us about things they see and know that we cannot fathom how
they see or know them.
· And
in Meeting yesterday, someone else stood and gave another example of all this…without
his knowing what I had been thinking about
Of course, I
see these as books, but by the time I seriously consider actually writing/researching
them, books may have been completely replaced by websites collecting this info,
if in fact they either haven’t already been written or the websites already created.
And the
bigger challenge might be that Cheryl’s dream is to travel cross country
sampling all kinds of local foods at various little restaurants and writing
about them. Hopefully she wants me to come along...if only to eat the foods she has no interest in eating, the sweeter and greasier the better!
And then
there’s the whole procrastination thing…
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