October 07, 2011

help...i have fallen and i can't get up

i just got through listening to npr's special about steve jobs. i had to sit in my driveway in my car to listen to the rest of the excerpts from his stanford commencement address. he is so smart! in retrospect, i think that he knew, somehow, that he would not live a very long life. some very much younger people will think that 56 is old, but from someone like me, who will be turning 55, it is not very old at all...not even close. he did so much in his short life and he did it well. as he said in his speech, one can only connect the dots in hindsight. one can see that what one did in the past will be a component for success in the future. with dropping out of college, getting fired from apple and being diagnosed with prostatic cancer, he realized that these things were needed to achieve what he did. when things go wrong in my life, i will look to his example.


when i drove up my driveway, i noticed that the pear tree across the street was in bloom. i looked around the neighborhood at the other pear trees, but this is the only one. i promise you that i took this photo yesterday and not last spring. you can tell by looking at the neighbor's yard. they don't have a sprinkler system and water by hand, but i don't think they watered the yard very much this summer. you can see bare spots of dirt where there is usually grass and the cypress looks a lot like ours with portions of it dying. the drought, even if one has a sprinkler system, took a toll on the trees. we watered extensively because we had planted 12 (!) new trees in the yard in early spring not knowing that we were going to have the hottest and driest summer on record.

anyhoo, the blooming pear tree across the street...do you think, like steve jobs, it knows that it is dying and is giving us one more look at what it can do?

rest in peace, mr jobs, you made great use of your time here and i thank you.

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