Hilton Head Island: 80

 

The age of miracles has not passed.  I am eighty years old today.  Few, if any, including me, expected I would reach such an age.  ‘Almost dying is a hard way to make a living’, I once wrote, and I have almost died more times than I can easily recall.  It goes with the territory of pushing beyond the edge of human experience.  Either I was very good or I was very lucky.  Perhaps both.

I now mostly live in a condo on South Carolina’s Hilton Head Island overlooking Skull Creek which is part of the Intracoastal Waterway.  GANNET is docked five hundred feet away.  I can see her mast from our windows and deck.

Hilton Head Island has a wonderful climate from October to May, but is too hot in the summer with heat indexes  routinely 105ºF.  So I am considering sailing somewhere cooler next summer.  Iceland sounds cool.

Carol and I will spend the day quietly.  I’ll go down and sit on GANNET for a while and consider what I’ve done with my life and what I might still do.  This evening we will go out to dinner and when we return I will pour some of my favorite liquid, Laphroaig 10 year old single malt Scotch, and raise my glass to you and to me and to our dreams and to the passion to fulfill them.

To life.

And yes.  I have done my age in push-ups today.  In fact twice my age in push-ups and crunches in sets of 80-40-40, with some knee bends and side leg rises mixed in.