At 84, average remaining is 6.38, but that is if you were born on January 1. So throw in another year and a slice, for average. That makes it over 90, on average. But what if you are healthier than average, a little? What if you live where you can drive down to the beach and walk a couple of miles along the Pacific every day? Mainly, what if your mother lived to 92? What if one of her ancestors applied for his Revolutionary War pension in 1832 at the age of 90, and got it? What if your mother would never forgive you for not outliving her? And what if you have chores you have to do, like shipping something like 60 or 70 boxes of your Melville collection to a library? What if you have in mind learning to self-publish, and starting with ReadIris and WordStar have put together a couple of collections of your speeches and articles on a 1970s-1980s topic, all of them still relevant? What if you are ready to publish hundreds, many hundreds, of terrific little stories about kinfolk you had never known until you used the Internet--stories from the 1600s and 1700s on which use their own words? Let's think this through.
What if you just did something that got a big review in the TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT and the current NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS? What if you published this year something in the SOUTHWESTERN HISTORICAL QUARTERLY about a cousin caught up in the Great Hangings at Gainesville, Texas, in 1862? And a big thing in a Melville journal? What if you can't imagine stopping work? What if you did not do the senior year in high school but went to work at 16 and a half as a telegrapher operator? What if Maurice Sendak put you into a kiddie book on a piece of newspaper flying in the wind that says "PARKER WORKS"? You keep going. There is a lot to do still. I think about Aunt Essie, whose birthday was October 30. On October 31, the day after she turned 90, she was asked her age and she said, "I'll be 91 on my next birthday." That attitude is what let Aunt Essie live in three centuries, even though not very long in two of them.
What if you just did something that got a big review in the TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT and the current NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS? What if you published this year something in the SOUTHWESTERN HISTORICAL QUARTERLY about a cousin caught up in the Great Hangings at Gainesville, Texas, in 1862? And a big thing in a Melville journal? What if you can't imagine stopping work? What if you did not do the senior year in high school but went to work at 16 and a half as a telegrapher operator? What if Maurice Sendak put you into a kiddie book on a piece of newspaper flying in the wind that says "PARKER WORKS"? You keep going. There is a lot to do still. I think about Aunt Essie, whose birthday was October 30. On October 31, the day after she turned 90, she was asked her age and she said, "I'll be 91 on my next birthday." That attitude is what let Aunt Essie live in three centuries, even though not very long in two of them.
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