.Their price is far above rubies

Within a month, Mrs. RWP (the lovely Ellie) and I will become great-grandparents for a second time, and we just learned that a third great-grandchild is expected to arrive in August. Time and tide, I've heard, wait for no man. I can report for a certainty that time does march on. Tides, on the other hand, come and go.

Here's one of my favorite passages from Shakespeare:

There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

If anyone cares, that passage is from Julius Caesar, Act IV, scene iii. Brutus is talking to Cassius.

From time immemorial, sophomore students at Mansfield High School (my alma mater) read Julius Caesar in Mr. D.P. Morris's English class. Except us. The year we were sophomores, the school district hired a second English teacher, Mrs. Elinor Field, and assigned sophomore English to her. In the spring of 1956 Mrs. Field, being the thoroughly modern sort, scrapped Julius Caesar and decided we should read instead The Man In The Gray Flannel Suit, a 1955 novel by Sloan Wilson that had just been made into a 1956 film starring Gregory Peck, I don't remember a thing about the novel. I finally got around to reading Julius Caesar on my own about 15 years later.

Because I do not possess very many of this world's goods, I suppose an argument could be made that I have spent my life bound in shallows and in miseries. I reject that notion out of hand. The fortune to which my own particular flood tide led consists of a wonderful wife who has shared the voyage with me for more than 60 years, three magnificent children, six magnificemt grandchildren, and, so far, as I mentioned earlier, three great-grandcildren with whom I am eager to become better acquainted.

It's important to understand what is truly valuable. I am rich in the things that count.