Hopefully I write one of these in less time than it takes me to write some of the blog posts i've been wanted to post


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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