Gene Hackman....Bite the Bullet: "The people some people marry"

One of our top-10 films of all time.  

    .....and one we watch over and over (and will again tonight)

It's not one that is coming up on anyone's list of favorite Gene Hackman films, much less on anyone's list of favorite all time films, but it would top my favorite Hackman list....with Hossiers in second place.  Vicky might put Hoosiers above it.

Bite the Bullet is about a group of riders participating in a long-distance horse race.  Two of them (Hackman and James Coburn) were ex-Rough Riders.  Then there is  a group of other great actors and actresses (Candace Bergen, Ben Johnson, Ian Bannen, Jan-Michael Vincent, etc).

Beautiful scenery.  A small shoot-out.  

And Gene Hackman talking about his deceased wife who, along with others, were tied by the Spanish outside the Spanish fort so Teddy Roosevelt and the Americans wouldn't fire on the fort.  His wife and the others tied to the fort yelled for the Americans to fire anyway.

She died.

Gene Hackman's lines about his deceased wife who he obviously still loves:  "I'm not worth her spit."   and "The people some people marry." 

The ending of the race is absolutely terrific and rousing.

His death and his real wife's deaths two days ago appear, at least right now, to have been accidental.   

What tragedy is teaching us

A few weeks ago there was a mid-air crash at the DC airport.  Many lives were lost.

As we read more about it, it became clear to us that this loss of life was predictable.

There had been close calls, one just a week earlier.  There was too much traffic. 

There had been warnings.....and too many people had ignored them.  

This shook us, and then it shook us even deeper.

We asked ourselves:  Are we letting God's messages to us to get through to us.  What might he be warning us about that we should heed?  

Within the past few months we both have broken our wrists.  What we notice is that one of the effects of aging is that healing is slower.  Last winter Vicky fell on her bike, and is being followed by an orthopedist about her knee.  

Cycling is very important to us.  We have cycled 33000 miles in our marriage...but only 1000 last year (after doing 5000 the year before that).

We are reading the signals:  We cannot do what we used to do, and unless we change we might be risking very serious accidents.  We are being warned.  

So, a biggie:  cycling is basically over for us.  We bought two electric trikes, and will be giving our 5 electric bikes to Candice to use for her trail marking.  They'll go to good use, so we're happy about that.

It would be legitimate to call a lot of what we do "exercise."  But we don't use that concept.  Instead, we both need to be outside moving our bodies, like we did as children of the 50s.  We really need to cycle.  We love cycling on the Rim, in Pine, and on the golf car trails in Leisure World in the early morning dark.  We just love it.  It's never been an effort to get out, even when the temperatures are below freezing.

But we're done.  We are going to make significant changes before something really serious happens.

Consequently, we purchased two RAD trikes.  Our chances of falling will be significantly less, and even if we might fall, our speeds will be slower so there will be more opportunities to right ourselves before a fall or to fall gently.

We've been given the warnings.  We need to heed them.

We will still be able to get out onto the golf paths at night, just the two of us, looking at the fountains, the moon, the coyotes, and each other.

 

Valentine's Day......We make lemonade

We have all kinds of reasons to be bummed out on this Valentine's Day.

Our bodies are not cooperating with the celebration.    They are lemons.

Let's start:

Vicky and I both have broken wrists that are healing.  

I got a head start on her on breaking wrists, so I'm a little ahead of her on the healing, but mine still hurts. I also have massive arthritis in that same wrist, so it will only heal partially, and I will have constant pain in it unless I have an operation. 

Vicky got her cast off today (Valentine's Day....I sure know how to show a girl a good time, don't I?) and is not supposed to lift anything. She has hourly exercises she has to do to stretch her wrist movements.  

Earlier this week, I got my stitches removed from the pacemaker I had put into my chest two weeks ago. I'm not supposed to raise my left arm above my shoulder for several more weeks.  If we played pickleball we'd have to give that up.  (when I typed "pickleball" I got a little red squiggly line under it indicating that it was misspelled.  Who would you trust with the spelling of pickleball, a senior citizen living in a senior living center or some young google techy?)

We can't hike, cycle, swim, and can only do limited walking because I also need foot surgery.  (Trump and Musk can do all of the cost cutting they want to do, but Vicky and I will always be one step ahead of them in this game because of our Medicare spending; in fact, believe it or not, before my birthday on January 31 we had BOTH met our yearly Medicare deductibles!!)

We had been (carefully) putting together our two new trikes this week, and now find she can't ride one for another month.  Dang.  We were so excited.

For the past few years it has been one thing after another.  Serious illnesses (heart attack, heart problems, prostate cancer), problems due to aging, problems with Vicky's back from being rear ended several years ago, and problems because we are active (Vicky's fall on her bike which has messed up her knee, her broken wrist from slipping on ice while walking, my broken wrist from hiking).  

It would be easy to be demoralized.  Especially because we had been doing everything "right."  Eating, exercising, weight control, watching old John Wayne westerns, everything. 

In the big picture, though, the "other thing we had been doing right" was aging.  We're really good at that.  And aging is better than the alternative.....and we are fully aware of that.

So we take our hits, pick ourselves up, and focus on what we can do together, even though it isn't nearly what we used to be able to do when we could cycle 100 miles/day, hike 8-10 miles a day, swim an hour/day, etc.  

Our Valentine's Day started well.  Here's the breakfast my one-armed wife prepared for me:

And here's my first gift to her for the day that I cleverly left in the kitchen for her to find when she was making my breakfast:

 

Our next part of our Valentine celebration was to get her cast off.  Go ahead, send us photos of you taking your sweetie to a 5-star restaurant, but she'll take my date over yours anytime.  Felt sooo good to get the cast off:

 

When we got home, it was my "wine time."  We opened the bottle of wine Vicky got for me that was shown in the first photo.  It is a Horse Heaven Hills wine, a place we cycled to up Weber Canyon on the Inland Empire Bike ride several times with Jules.  One of our favorite experiences. 

Ever opened a bottle of wine when, between the two of you, there is only one good arm, Vicky's left one?  

Try it sometime.  

Here we are.....two people doing the job of one...opening a wine bottle:

Then we danced.  Ever tried dancing with only one good arm between the two of you?  I needed to be oh so careful with Vicky's injured arm, which meant we couldn't do almost all of our patterns.  

But that didn't stop us.  We're not trying to win any prizes with our dancing...we're just trying to enjoy moving together to beautiful music.

 

You can see our casts in the photo above.  I probably should have had my left arm in the sling the doctor gave me that I'm supposed to wear everywhere, including to bed.  But, and I listened carefully to him, he didn't say to wear it dancing.  I'm not officially violating doctor's orders, am I....AM I?

Here is one of our dances, to one of our favorite songs:  My cup runneth over.  

Then Vicky prepared our dinner, which consisted of Filet Mignon, a twice-cooked baked potato, and asparagus as only she can make it. (by the way, and this may be helpful at some point for you to know, but those google techies wouldn't let me type the word "Mignon" unless I capitalized it.....you learn something every day, even at age 77).

To cook our meal I got to try out the new grill Candice had given me (and assembled) for my birthday when she was out here two weeks ago helping us after we both had surgery.  Boy was it ever needed.  She left one afternoon to "run an errand" and when she came back, she and Vicky forbade me to come outside where she was assembling it.  I've learned now that whenever Candice says she needs to "run an errand" to just let her--it will probably be something good for me.

Worked GREAT Candice!!!

And was dinner ever good.  

 

The alert reader may have noticed that we had both breakfast in bed and dinner in bed.  Golly do we love being retired and old....one can get away with sooooo much.

We watched the 1957 movie 3:10 to Yuma.  This one has a special place in my heart, and it's a wonderful love story of just an ordinary man (not a gunslinger) taking care of his family by doing something he is totally unprepared to do.  The outlaw who he is taking to the train grows to respect him and his family, and actually saves his life at the end.  

Another aspect of this film for me is a powerful and beautiful family memory.  On the way to the movie with my dad, in 1957, I realized that, for about the first time (maybe actually the first time), my sister Kathy was going with us.  This meant that my mom was home alone.

So I asked dad to stop the car, and I got out, and started to walk back to the house to be with mom so she wouldn't be alone.  I felt so bad for her.  As I started walking, my dad got out and told me that it was OK, that mom would be fine and that I could go to the movie.

Later that night, in my bedroom, when my parents thought I was asleep, I heard my father tell this story to my mother.  She never said anything about it, nor did he.  But I was so proud that my mother knew I cared about her in this way.  And I always did, right up to her death when Vicky and I were there (and my sister Kathy was waiting her turn) holding her hand.

Vicky knows this story, and also that this western is not just a shoot-em-up.  We enjoyed it once again.

Then it was GIFT TIME!!!!  boy o boy o boy o boy

I got Vicky a luggage tag featuring the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.  I'll bet NOBODY reading this blog entry ever got a luggage tag for Valentine's Day, did you?  Did you?  Well, too bad, because I'm already taken so you'll probably never get one either.  (Vicky here….and I am never, ever giving this wonderful husband up!)

This one is significant for us because this group sang a song titled Ripplin' Waters, which is our song representing our cabin that we love so much.  

 

I also gave her two old dancing dolls.  Mexican.  They are really lovely.  Vicky has been collecting dolls from other countries since she was a little girl.  We have them displayed throughout our home in Mesa and our cabin in Pine.

best of all, they BOTH look just like us!

Vicky made a package of fudge for me.....shaped like a heart.   Isn't that sweet?  Not just that she made fudge for me (which I love), but she went to that extra sweetness of making it shaped like a heart.  

If you visit, I'd love to share some of it with you, but I won't.

AND then, for the cup of grass, she gave me the best gift I'll probably never get.  

(that probably needs a little explaining, but after I do you'll agree with me).

Once a year, through our little hamlet of Pine, they run a Pony Express, called the Hashknife Pony Express.  You can mail letters which the riders will carry.  It's not well known that you can mail letters this way, but Vicky, true to form, found out you could.

So, she found the perfect valentine of a cowboy and had it mailed through the Pony Express.  Here it is.  See the pony express outline through it?

 

I'd show you what it looks like inside, except that someone must have put our pony down when it got lame because it never arrived.

But don't you agree?  Isn't this the best valentine's day gift ever?  And the fact that it didn't "officially" get to me doesn't mean squat.  I can picture it, and I know the feelings that went into it, and I also know that she's MY Valentine and NOBODY ELSE'S!!!!

Here are the cards we gave to each other:

 

So, don't you agree?  Life has recently given us lemons, but we are not going to let those lemons define us.  We got the greatest calls and texts from our children and grandchildren who are all doing well (what else in life could be better than that?), and we had a day with each other filled with love.

We made lemonade.

Since I'm writing this particular blog, I get to end with this:

I love you, my wife, my treasure.

 

 

You are the sun, I am the moon….

 Moon setting….

Sun rising….

Late morning the buzzards were hanging out behind our home….

And mid-afternoon our friendly coyote that lives in our neighborhood came to visit us again!

It’s unbelievable that in the middle of a metropolitan area where five million people live, we can see  so many wild animals and experience such solitude and beauty….we love it!

You are the sun, I am the moon

You are the words, I am the tune, play me.

 

 

 

 

Vicky and Dan forever

 Thirty-five years ago.  In our early 40’s…..

We have loved each other all our lives….