Enjoy every sandwich

In conversation with my friends over the weekend, talk moved to the people we used to work with -- I was wondering if Dave was still in touch with any, what had happened to them, etc. Honig was a wonderful place to work in those days, and somehow people stayed in touch. Of course, especially back then, the ad world in San Francisco was relatively small, so people do stay in touch and work together in one way or another.

Dave said that he was still in touch with some -- one was failing pretty badly, several were dead, others had cancer or other deadly diseases. These are our contemporaries, although Dave and I were younger than say, the upper level management folks. The talk then moved to others -- people I either didn't remember or didn't know, and one quote from the evening has really stuck with me. They were talking with one friend who had cancer and not long to live, and the man told them: enjoy every sandwich, because you never know how many more you will have. Of course, that applies to all of life, not just sandwiches, and it's so, so true. We really take so much for granted in our daily lives.

Today I had to drive into town to take Ayya to a bus stop. We left here around noon and soon encountered a highway patrolman stopping all the cars coming our way and not letting them go on. We thought maybe it was due to some scheduled road work about 10 miles up the road. When I came back around 3:30, they were still stopping traffic. The man said there was a tanker wrecked 'about a mile' up the road that had traffic blocked in both directions. He let me go because we were clear that far.

When I got up on our road I had a clear view of the scene, and it wasn't pretty even more than 3 hours later. The second tanker trailer was upright and moved to the side of the road -- didn't see the truck and first tanker, but the pavement was black over a large area so I thought there must have been a huge fire. I couldn't see how anybody could have survived that. But, it turned out not to be a fire and the driver had only minor injuries. Still!

So here's a guy just out doing his job, never thinking when he left home this morning that he wouldn't have another sandwich. Fortunately, this guy lived. That doesn't change the point of this blog entry.

Enjoy every minute. Don't take anything for granted. Don't wish for more than you have and miss out on everything that you do have. That's my rather morbid philosophy for today. I'm planning to enjoy every minute of my last week in these redwoods.