"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..." is the opening line to a classic favorite, "A Tale of Two Cities" by Charles Dickens. That man had a way with words. 2023 was one of those years for us. We had milestone birthdays and family gatherings and were reunited with family members after many years. We even had a vacation to New Hampshire and Maine coast. The worst of times was losing two loved ones, a sister and a niece.
Cleaning out George's sister's apartment, we were again reminded the value of our earthly possessions. and the older we get, the more we notice just how much we have accumulated in our lives. Purging can be such a daunting task. Often things will take us down memory lane as we decide whether to let go of the tangible piece of a memory that we are holding in our hands.
When I was purging some of our things this year, I stumbled across the copy of the rules for our first road rally in August 1975. We were given clues and drove all around Bloomfield area looking for specific landmarks--mind you, this was before cell phones, so it was all brain power. It was timed so that if you went too fast, you were penalized. The distance between clues was in kilometers and we had to convert them to miles.
I love games and puzzles. This was a challenge and the stress of reading clues, converting mileage, and finding the landmarks tested our ability to problem solve and handle stress together, which led us both to doubt our upcoming wedding in November. Perhaps this should be part of pre-marital counseling. Despite the bad parts, we always, over the years, whenever we heard of a road rally, jumped on the chance to do it. Later we learned about letter boxing and had fun deciphering those clues, sometimes successfully and other times not so well--one time we even got lost in the woods. But we don't give up and we are proud to say that we won a scavenger hunt in Norfolk only a few years ago.
Why am I rambling on about this? Well, I was thinking about how much I love trivia and learning. I find myself on the internet on so many rabbit trails or down rabbit holes that I even googled the difference between those two terms. I mean who doesn't need to know that Borden's cow, Elsie, was married to Elmer (of the glue fame) and they had two children, Beauregard and Buella? Or that penguins take 10,000 4 second power naps (microsleeps) a day? Or that Karen is the name of a foreign language? Those are just a sampling of the trails I have followed.
I was thinking about our lives and how they are like a scavenger hunt. Some seek money, some fame, some love, some just fun. How we get there is our journey. We learn some things along the way, some the hard way, some just by our accumulation of lifelong experiences.
