Well it's almost too late to get another post into June, isn't it?

It's almost too late for a lot of things. It IS too late to die young, for example - at least James Dean young, or My Dad young. Too late for that altogether, and it makes for some odd musings & cogitations, that. The widely acknowledged "borrowed time" notion, for example, whereby kids of parents who died young pass the marker on their own roads, and probably stop for a bit to contemplate it. "Here's the point on life's journey where the Old Man bailed out" is one way to see it. I suppose it's egocentrism that makes me phrase it that way, surely there are women whose mothers died young who must have the same thoughts; I wonder if the "borrowed time" thing is as prevalent among men whose mothers died young, or women/father pairings of similar situations? But what's all this about, I hear you snicker uncomfortably, as if hoping there'd be something witty and clever or at least diverting hereupon. Well what it's about is that I've discovered that it is, in fact NOT too late to embark on a serious crack at a "life's work" or at least a chunk of it. And that commitment, which I've been tap-dancing around for fifty years or more is liberating in the sense that - at least for a little while - I'm actually taking steps to realize what has 'til now been mostly moping internally. The writing is taking shape with the help of some former strangers with whom I've banded as a "writers' group" and with whom I'm sharing progress and frustration, along with their own progress & frustration. It's very interesting to note that we're a disparate bunch in terms of how much we've actually accomplished: several of the folks have completed multiple narratives so what we're seeing of their work is second or later drafts, one guy hasn't written anything yet, and my piece is definitively "in progress" so they're suffering through the initial composition phase. I think we're all learning something. I may have overcome my "stuck at 2000 words" syndrome, as well as the "if I start writing about the writing I'll never get the writing done" fears. It's good; scary as hell, but good. I'm dealing with the notion that the legitimacy of taking it seriously is entirely up to me, nobody else, and nodoby else has to like it, approve of the effort much less the product, or endorse it, or even acknowledge it.