Probably, it started out with being grumpy. Everything seems to go back to that. I ws a grumpy young man. And so, since that didn’t make a lot of sense to everyone else, they overlooked that I was young, saw that I was grumpy and assumed I was older than my age.
Always, I got along with older people. I guess some of that had to do with being around them to the exclusion of anyone else. There were a lot of kids my age around where I grew up. In fact there weren’t a lot of people around where I lived. There were lots of animals, though, I got used to being with animals – not just dogs and cats but also cattle, sheep, pigs and a horse named Patsy. Farm kids tend to understand animals from an early age.
In education I received my Associates Degree after I had received two Bachelor’s degrees. It’s how it worked out. Call it a gift from Uncle Sam. In the process of learning Chinese I earned enough credits that when combined with enough courses from my prior higher education the Community College of the Air Force granted me an AA.
There are many other exactly of how I have done things backwards. I call it temporal dyslexia – living like you’re older when you’re younger and as I get older I live more like a younger person: renting a room in some one else house, working part time for a store shagging shopping carts and loading bags, riding a bicycle to work and pretty much everywhere else I go.
If all this has a purpose, as I’m sure it does, it will come to me in time, exactly when I’m ready to understand it and not a moment before. That’s how life works. And with the prospective I’ve gains after years of being a grumpy younger man, I’m not as grumpy anymore. In fact I’m not grumpy at all. Having used up every conceivable reason for being grumpy, I’m tend to be happy with who I am and what I am doing.
I’ve been rich and now I’m poor by others’ standards. But you know what? The way I see it when I was rich I was really poor and now that I’m poor I finally understand what it is that makes me rich and it has nothing at all to do with money. If you think that it takes money to make you happy, you’re probably grumpy most of the time too. And you are suffering tom temporal dyslexia because you have some things backwards in your life as well.
The One & Only Elgon 