No apologies for that, as I can almost guarantee you what he would have said if someone offered their opinion on the matter.
He smoked his whole life from about age 9. He drank heavily except for about a decade and half, which was from when I was born until I became a teenager. But before that time he was hell on wheels and after that time he became legendary around Smithwick and beyond.
Cecil Lewis lived his life throwing caution to the wind. He didn’t spend a lot of his time contemplating his next move. He just got a thought in his head and moved on with it. Much of the time it worked out, because he had an abundance of common sense. But there were times when things failed to go as planned.
I’m telling you all this because I have lived by an adage “I somehow need to at live longer than my Dad did”. I often have thought about that, but with my mind not being very clear during the past couple of years, due to Covid-19 and the after effects of that, I let that day slip past without recognizing it. May 4, 2022 was that magic date.
I’ll have to admit that I don’t mind borrowing a few more days and then live them to the fullest. It just ain’t that time yet. But when the time comes, I’ll face it head on and be proud for the days and times I’ve had.
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Angora Chronicles 
My own father lived to the age of 70 + 4 months. He had outlived his father by about a year. That never occured to me until my younger brother pointed it out sometime in the last decade when HE was feeling poorly about his own prospects. I found the standard of “outliving Dad” to be artificial and have not used it at all Beside that, I seem to genetically favor our mother’s side of the family, where people generally live well into their 80s. My brother’s health seems to have generally returned now, so he’ll outlive our Dad (as I have), though I hope he sets a higher goal for himself
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My mother passed at 57, suddenly. Generally I have folks on both sides that have lived really old, more of the women than the men. My dads father was a very clean living fellow, never had bad habits, and passed at 57 years old.
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I recently wrote all of Ecclesiastes into songs. There turned out to be 40 of them to get in all 12 chapters. The injustice of “the good die young and the unjust live on” seemed to be a big part of that scripture writer’s complaint with life, too.
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