If you live long enough every Date on the Calendar will have a memory | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Sit down one day and write all the dates that come to mind and their meaning to you.

    If you follow my suggestion as above, you may have some indication as to your life's true meaning. Keep the dates as written in the order you wrote them. That indicates a psychological importance assigned by your subconscious mind. You may be surprised how many dates pop up that you do not normally think about.

    After my school years, I was never much interested in dates like Holidays, Birthdays or Anniversaries. Christmas and Thanksgiving were the two most important dates for me. That was because it was a time for the whole family to be together.

    Several others represent important milestones in world history but I came to the decision that many were just an excuse for a day off from work. It was not a result of deep thought but just the idea that every day you wake up should be a "Red Letter Day" to celebrate. I did not make a conscious decision to celebrate or not celebrate certain dates.

    There are negotiations over how many holidays are paid and when do they fall. They have rules set up for holidays where you must work the day before and the day after to be paid for the holiday. The government has designated multiple days that are not necessarily holidays but need recognition for some reason or the other.

    My lack of interest in certain dates caused quite a bit of problems for me over the years. As I grew older, certain dates took on a meaning specific to me.

    When I was twenty-three years old, one date stood out. It was your DEROS. (DEROS = date Eligible for return from overseas.) That date was the dim light at the end of a long tunnel that got brighter each day until it finally warmed your heart.

    After that, it was your ETS (Eligible date for termination of service). Do not get me wrong, I enjoyed every minute I spent "thinking" about those dates. I cannot say much for the time when I was not "thinking" about them.

    For the next six or seven years, dates did not matter much to me. I devoted those years to catching up on life. It is funny how it takes six or seven years to catch up for only one year, but c'est la vie.

    I am ashamed to admit that my marriage date did not stick in my mind. We had a copy of the front page of the Atlanta Journal framed and put on the wall going down the steps to my basement office. I would look at it from time to time to remind me of the date.

    I probably spent more time keeping track of customer birthdays than anybody else's birthday. I would send a card to my most important customers on their birthday. I did not remember the dates, but kept a tickler file (If you remember that you are an old relic).

    At thirty-five years old, my first child was born. That is when the date thing began to take on a serious meaning. My second child came 21 months later.

    Between Forty-five and forty-eight years old I was the executor for my favorite uncle's estate and a cousin's estate. Those dates will stick in your mind because there are legal benchmarks to meet.

    In 1991, Georgia H.W. Bush made the decision to liberate Kuwait. The invasion began on 17 January 1991. I admit I had to look it up, but it was the night that my carefully wrapped and packaged Vietnam memories blew up in my face. My wife woke me up and said I was having a nightmare. It might have been a nightmare from her viewpoint but to me it was a fast 'Delorean Trip' back twenty-three years. Where is Dr. Emmett Brown when I needed him? That experience added several other dates to my mental tickler file.

    Then things settled down for a few years until the inevitable Angel of Death began his visitations. Family members and friends began to take a walk with the Angel of Death. That is when it finally dawned on me that you do not get to pick your important dates. Life assigns then to you and you have no way of planning or anticipating the next important date.

    At the start of this recollection, I wrote that I was never much interested in dates. While I do not dwell on the calendar too much now, I log most of my semi-important dates on the IPhone Calendar. I set an alarm to beep me several days or hours before the appointment. That would be the doctor appointments and other such milestones of a forgetful mind. A dentist appointment six months off does not even get past my eardrum. If they did not send me a text, email and phone call prior to it, I am sure I would miss it.

    In a way, I think this is payback for all those dates that I foolishly thought were not important in my youth. You know, the birthdays of family and friends, the anniversaries, and the other dates that I felt seemed so trivial at the time

    When I started doing ancestor research, I built an Excel spreadsheet with all the family dates. Because I get bored and have a compulsion for details, I have sorted the dates to see how many days on the calendar represent a significant date to me; then I added those dates that I had on my list. Out of 365 days in a year I have important memories associated with 285 days, some are repeated. I only went back one generation from me. That leaves 80 dates left to have a meaningful event in my life. I will work hard to make those 80 dates meaningful for others.

    However, if I ever get down to only one date left, I hope it is February 29, which occurs only once every four years. If I am lucky enough to reach that one date status, I plan on moving because the Angle of Death does not take any prisoners and what do you think would be the most important date in your life but the end of such life.

    I had a good friend who says he would not want to know the date of his future death but he would like to know the place. That way he could be sure he never went anywhere near that place for the rest of eternity. I immediately told him that the place could be generic as in "Bar". He was a good friend and I really miss him.

Angel of Death

- Bobby Tony The unofficial Roving Fluff Reporter 2016