The older I get, the more I enjoy Saturday mornings. Perhaps it’s the slow pace of Saturday morning, not having to get ready to go off to work, or maybe it’s the unbounded joy of not having to be at work!\u00a0 Either way, the first few hours of a Saturday morning are most enjoyable.<\/p>\n
A few weeks ago, I was heading down to the radio shack, as I like to do on cool winter mornings, to listen around the bands a bit and see what’s going on. What began as a typical Saturday morning turned into one of those lessons that life seems to hand you from time to time. Let me tell you about it:<\/p>\n
I turned the dial up into the phone portion of the 40 meter band on my ham radio in order to listen around the band a while. Along the way, I came across an older sounding chap, with a tremendous signal and a golden voice. You know the kind; he sounded like he should be in the broadcasting business. He was telling whom-ever he was talking with something about “a thousand marbles.” I was intrigued and stopped to listen to what he had to say.<\/p>\n
“Well, Tom, it sure sounds like you’re busy with your job.\u00a0 I’m sure they pay you well but it’s a shame you have to be away from home and your family so much. Hard to believe a young fellow should have to work sixty or seventy hours a week to make ends meet. It’s too bad you missed your daughter’s “dance recital” he continued. “Let me tell you something that has helped me keep my own priorities.” And that’s when he began to explain his theory of a “thousand marbles.”
\n“You see, I sat down one day and did a little arithmetic. The average person lives about seventy-five years. I know, some live more and some live less, but on average, folks live about seventy-five years.”<\/p>\n
“Now then, I multiplied 75 times 52 and I came up with 3900, which is the number of Saturdays that the average person has in their entire lifetime. Now, stick with me, Tom, I’m getting to the important part.”<\/p>\n
“It took me until I was fifty-five years old to think about all this in any detail”, he went on, “and by that time I had lived through over twenty-eight hundred Saturdays.\u00a0 I got to thinking that if I lived to be seventy-five, I only had about a thousand of them left to enjoy. So I went to a toy store and bought every single marble they had. I ended up having to visit three toy stores to round up 1000 marbles. I took them home and put them inside a large, clear plastic container right here in the shack next to my gear.”<\/p>\n
“Every Saturday since then, I have taken one marble out and thrown it away. I found that by watching the marbles diminish, I focused more on the really important things in life.”<\/p>\n
“There<\/u> is<\/u> nothing<\/u> like<\/u> watching<\/u> your<\/u> time<\/u> here<\/u> on<\/u> this<\/u> earth<\/u> run<\/u> out<\/u> to<\/u> help<\/u> get<\/u> your<\/u> priorities<\/u> straight<\/u>.”<\/p>\n
“Now let me tell you one last thing before I sign-off with you and take my lovely wife out for breakfast. This morning, I took the very last marble out of the container. I figure that if I make it until next Saturday then I have been given a little extra time. And the one thing we can all use is a little more time.”<\/p>\n
“It was nice to meet you Tom, I hope you spend more time with your family, and I hope to meet you again here on the band. This is a 75 Year old Man, K9NZQ, clear and going QRT, good morning!”<\/p>\n
You could have heard a pin drop on the band when this fellow signed off. I guess he gave us all a lot to think about. I had planned to work on the antenna that morning, and then I was going to do some work on the scooter, change the oil in the car, and do some other things downstairs in the shop.<\/p>\n
Instead, I went upstairs and said to my wife, “C’mon honey, lets go out for breakfast.” “What brought this on?” she asked with a smile. “Oh, nothing special, it’s just been a long time since we spent a Saturday together. And hey, can we stop at a toy store while we’re out? I need to buy some marbles.<\/p>\n
And so, as one smart bear once said…”If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day, so I never have to live without you.” – Winnie the Pooh.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The older I get, the more I enjoy Saturday mornings. Perhaps it’s the slow pace of Saturday morning, not having to get ready to go off to work, or maybe it’s the unbounded joy of not having to be at work!\u00a0 Either way, the first few hours of a Saturday morning are most enjoyable. A […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-87","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-amateur-radio","category-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.n4rfc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.n4rfc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.n4rfc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.n4rfc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.n4rfc.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=87"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.n4rfc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.n4rfc.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=87"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.n4rfc.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=87"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.n4rfc.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=87"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}