Living Life Well

I REMEMBER ONCE, about fifty years ago when I was twenty years old, saying and believing that I would like to meet everyone in the world. All four billion people. During the same conversation I mentioned a few names of folks of whom I was especially fond. As I talked, my list lengthened. "Hell, you like everybody" my friend piped up. He had a point. I had been a shy kid, but nice, and friendly, had grown popular, and was well supplied with friends, neighbors, whifffle sand lot baseball buds, classmates. I was very popular in high school, smart, if a bit geeky, the class clown. By the time I reached tent hgrade my shyness was gone, evaporated in the hallways of a high school filled of peers. I was out of my shell. I stayed out of it, and my fify years as an adult have been gregarious ones.Usually, I speak to stranges psssing in the street. I start conversations. I often wonder whether I am being too aggressively friendly, too forward, but such musing dost not change my behavior, which is dug in deep. One my my closest lifelig freinds says that he can understand people becoming occasionally annoyed with me, but that he cannot understand anyone not liking me. Thatflatters me. My older sister, my only sibling, says that I a the smartest, nicest man she has ever known, including, evidently, her husband, but I think she adores me and is is biased. Like almost everyone, my youthful exuberances have mellowed somewhat with age. My philos has gradually, with elife's experiences accumalting, soured a bit into misanthropy, or something like that. Now I always think and talk about how I don't like people, but those closest to me think, or know, that I am lying. I make friends with people, and I wear a derby on my head, as others do, to quote Brtolt Brecht. I tell myself to maintain a positive attitude, and generally I do .My old love of humanity never totally died, it merely got submerged in layers of living. I want to die old, amd I will. Equally, I want to die with a certain nobility of soul, as I like to say, and a positive attitude about a life for the most part well lived. God and other people are free to form their own opinions. What matters most to me is mine.