Butch Lawson

I just got a brand-new Motorola cellular telephone and it's a beauty. It replaces my previous Motorola, a brand I've carried since the '90s. I have always purchased a Moto-model made to mil-specs and I've never broken one, despite rough handling, dropping on concrete and asphalt, and being run over by a humongous snowplow.

If I were asked to select only one occupation to represent all occupations that have outlived their intended purposes, it would be an easy decision. The hands-down winner of the coveted Brass Butt-Nugget Award would be the world's packaging engineers.

Halfway through the summer already and I'm still trying to catch up to the calendar. It's not a fair race. I think the calendar got a good six-week head start.

In days of yore, people spent a very long time trying to figure out exactly what was happening and why it was only happening in "yore." Even now, in the post-yore era, there remains a good deal of confusion about the exact timing of this period in history.

After more than 80 years of nearly constant practice and exhaustive training, I am embarrassed to admit that my tongue still can't stay out of the way of my teeth. Just as disappointing is my starboard cheek, which gets slammed nearly as often as my tongue.

I spent my career in a world where numbers defined success or failure, profit or loss, win or lose. It could be at once rewarding and heartbreaking. I made some lifelong friends — men to ride the river with, as they say in Texas — and I encountered a few black-hearted snakes destined, I hope, for a long swim in the Lake of Fire.

As ol' Al Tennyson said, "In the Spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love." First, that's a young man's problem, and, as I remember, there was nothing "light" about that particular fancy. But, more to the point, while young men have their own challenges, the rest of us also have stuff to be happy about in the spring.

This month we're talking about my 40th birthday. There was no party, no plane ride, but it was memorable for a different reason. At that time I had a wife, a couple of kids, a mortgage, two car payments, a crappy day job in a factory, and a tight, four-piece country band. I had everything I needed for a head-on collision with reality, and it did not disappoint.

When the nurse came into the examining room, she came in hurriedly, a fresh smile on her face and hand extended in what she must have felt was a normal workday greeting situation. I was sitting there on the parchment paper-covered table in a too-small hospital gown that was missing one of the two strings used to tie it closed in the back.

The calendar says it's still autumn, but I know winter when I see it. As I write this, there is snow on the ground, it's 30 degrees, and the weather station says there's a 30-mph westerly wind gusting to over 40. There are whitecap rollers in the bay and I'm loving Maine being Maine. But, for some reason, today's weather makes me think of a time long ago when Maine weather taught me a life lesson that I'll share with you.