Sentiment

From Grubb Street, talking about roleplaying games:

"This image (and all images) is off the 'net. My woodgrain box was long-ago crushed through use and travel, and the booklets worn and coverless. The Lovely Bride has one in better condition, but it is one of the later white boxes."

Sentimentality is a funny thing.  I confess I have my own weaknesses in this, which I've occasionally posted from time to time.  It is hard not to be prompted occasionally by the touch of awe we had for these things, or the ways we invested our lives so heavily into the game.  Evenings spent around kitchen tables in friends houses ~ friends who are long gone now, and who knows what has become of them ~ with parents looking in to say something disparaging or to voice legitimate curiousity.  Every bit of the tactile still brings an immediate affection that isn't lost, even though it has been decades since.

Would that I had known then what I know now; the games I would have run, the adventures I would have built, the maps I would have drawn.  As a compliment to dewy-eyed memories of the past there is the stark truth that time is getting shorter at the other end, the one in front of me.  It's not that likely that I will be able to look upon right now after four decades have passed.  Will I impress myself?  Is there sentiment left for that future me to look back at this present and feel the touch of the keys under my fingers, to remember the comments and the time spent writing post after post?  I wonder what the things I am doing today will inspire in the things I will be doing ten or twenty years from now.  When I was a boy of 15, the age of 21 seemed so far off ... but now, of course, six years is but a stroll to the corner.  I can look back on the last six years and shrug at the meagre distance between me and 2014.  So will there be anything new in the next ten?  Or am I at the end of things, where from here on it is just bookkeeping.

I see that in others my age; and I am a lot closer to what it means to be 75 than I could have imagined 20 years ago.  It seems that most people as they pass their mid-50s stride, they're content to ease down the hill on the other side and just let ambition go.

I don't feel that way.  But I don't feel as well as I did, either.  Every little part of the body breaks down.  I'm on daily pills now for my blood pressure.  Some mornings my hips are so bad it takes two rounds of aspirin to sit easy.  The doctor is a regular thing, at least once a month between my partner and I; and there are a lot of evenings when we decide we're too sore from the day's work to do anything but rest.  A lot of evenings, I don't work at any project.  I'm just too tired to think too hard.

And then, I let myself get angry at all that, and tell my body that I'm in charge, and it can just go ahead and hurt as much as it wants, I'm getting this done.  I have a lot of really good days like that.  Days when I go to bed at night feeling proud of myself.  Days when I want a hill to climb, rather than one to stroll down.  I like those days better.

I hope there will always be a lot of them ahead of me.