The context is important

With the pandemic still restricting our lives, we haven't driven out of town a lot. But we did go out today to do some shopping. On the road, I saw one of those flashing road signs that said, "Others wear a mask." Well, that sounded like a bad thing to tell people. Especially on an official state highway sign. It seems like they are saying we don't need to worry about wearing a face mask because other people will be wearing their masks and that will protect us.

Of course, I jumped the gun. There is only so much space on those signs and it takes more than one screen full to get the entire message across. So, they split the message up into phrases that will fit on one screen and then show another screen of text after a few seconds.

As we drove by the sign, it switched to the other screen which read, "PROTECT YOURSELF AND" It's important to realize that all the characters on the sign are upper case and there is no punctuation. But in my head, I saw the first phrase, "OTHERS WEAR A MASK," as "Others" with this capitalization and the first word in the sentence. When the second screen appeared, "PROTECT YOURSELF AND", I realized the entire sentences was supposed to be, "Protect yourself and others. Wear a mask."

It would be nice if highway signs could display mixed case and punctuation. It would also be nice if the entire message could be displayed at once. How many accidents are caused as drivers divert their attention from the road to watch the sign until all the pieces of a message are displayed? Then again, I could leave the reading and interpretation of flashing highway signs to my passengers. I will also hold off judging highway sign messages until I know the whole story.

"Time Enough at Last"

 

Time Enough at Last

My title refers to one of the great The Twilight Zone episodes staring Burgess Meredith. It's the episode about a man who has a bunch of books that we wants to read but never has the time. He fits in as much reading time as he can but he has a job and other responsibilities and just can't seem to fit in enough reading time. I don't want to ruin the story for you if you are one of the ten people in the world who doesn't know the story. Let me just say that during the story, he does finally have enough time to do all the reading he wants.

I can empathize with this character. I love to read but with my job, and responsibilities at home, I never seemed to have enough time to read all the books I have bought over the years. I told my family and friends that I was saving the books for when I retired. There are shelves of them waiting for eyes to read them. Well, today was my last day at work!

I have retired and I am looking forward to reading all my books. I will also have time to write about what I have read and I plan to do that on this blog, too. And I will now have more time to write about other things in this blog. I have over 300 draft posts I haven't had the time to prepare for publishing.

I am also looking forward to playing the piano more. I have a copy of a piano transcription of Rhapsody in Blue that I have never been able to play all the way through. I am going to be working on that as well as other music I used to be able to play but is now out of practice. Maybe I'll even have enough time to memorize the music.

I am going to miss work, especially the work I was doing, and I am going to miss the people I worked with. But it is time to go. I worked at this job for 33 years and I worked 13 years at a previous job. I was slowing down and not keeping up with all the younger people at work. I gave the company over a year of warning so they could hire someone else to take over my responsibilities. They found a very capable person to replace me. He will keep things going and expand the product with new ideas and energy.

I am 70 years old and in good health and it would be a shame to miss this time with my wife and my children. We can do more things together and that is going to be great. Once we have more control over the pandemic, we will also be able to travel together. I can write about that, too. And there is a lot of work to do around the house and now I have time to do those jobs. I can write about that, too!

I'm looking forward to this next part of my life. There is now, truly, time enough at last.