My chronometer flipped over to a new decade yesterday, so I observed the occasion with a 60-lap swim plus a 60-mile ride. What else can one do, except to take a symbolic swipe back at Old Man Time? It was a satisfactory way to test my fitness. The best part is that the thunderstorms held off until dark, and Dana welcomed me back with pie.
This image goes well with the one from 1981 below. What was going through my father’s mind, now that he had a baby boy — the third in line with the name of John Dixon?
Certainly there are numerous examples in our modern world of neglected values and inhumanity, but one would hope that the race is making steady progress, when we score ourselves against the prevailing conditions of the not-too-distant past: unbridled tyranny, wholesale intolerance, unapologetic bigotry, vicious persecution, and the justification of might for its own sake. Nevertheless, there are deeply troubling problems with aggressive human greed at the core: gross manipulation of the food supply, relentless loss of biodiversity, the trampling of fragile cultures for resource acquisition, a mass media that thrives on the banal, and the insidious stripping of individual freedoms in the quest for political gain (to name a few). Although woefully less self-reliant, I think that most human beings are less violent and more sensitive to others than our typical counterpart from previous ages, but the base distortions that drive our pervasive communications infrastructure would make us believe otherwise.
This is the image I’m connecting with today. A picture of the beauty to whom I proposed. After the British rifle match, I collapsed and missed Easter, battling a virus in near delirium. I managed to recover enough to be rather functional by today, in order to help Dana observe her important milestone. She initially wanted to attend the Keeneland races, but changed her mind when the day never warmed up. “Birthday weather” did not arrive. We almost went to see The Descendants until we realized it was at the top of our Netflix queue. So we joined David and Lee for a nice Italian dinner in Lexington. Now I’ll be in “my 50s” for 18 more days and we’ll pretend as if there are two decades between us.
