Rubber rafts, a king, and the Byrds

I thought of my dad yesterday. Buck, as he was known to his friends, loved to hunt and fish more than anything. He owned about 12 guns and no one ever could have counted his fishing poles accurately. He also owned a military-like and quality rubber raft. He made some simple adaptations to the raft and used it for fishing and duck hunting.

Dad spent hours planning and calculating what he was going to do and how he was going to enrich his outdoors experiences. He reminded me of a mad scientist or at least a Thomas Edison of hunting and fishing. Picture a room in the basement that was dimly lit and one of the nastiest rooms I have ever seen. This was his sanctuary and his fortress of solitude.

He spent an entire winter planning his biggest adventure. He was determined to enter the Atlantic Ocean from the shore using his raft. He had calculated the best way to get out over the breakers. He used tide tables and tried to control all variables. He decided he needed someone on shore to help him by using a rope tied to the raft. I think he felt it would add stability and he picked my aunt to man the rope because she possessed brute strength. However, she did not have nerves of steel and never fully followed his direction which led to an amazing home movie of dad and raft getting absolutely wiped out by waves. He never tried again after that.

When dad died, we found countless notebooks with ideas, inventions and plans he devised to enjoy his hobbies of hunting and fishing. I also found the raft, which because of inactivity, had dry rotted.

King Solomon wrote a famous passage in Ecclesiastes Chapter 3. Later the Byrds released a folk classic based on this passage:

1. To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
2. A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, a time to reap that which is planted;
3. A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
4. A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
5. A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
6. A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
7. A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
8. A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.   

The memories of dad sparked a realization. Do we spend too much time preparing, procrastinating, or over analyzing things in our life and actually never doing them? I have heard people say that this can be called "paralysis by analysis". Life is unpredictable. Life is short and there are so many things that each of us want to do and experience. We need to realize that time does matter. Do you have a "bucket list" of any kind? I do. I want to spend the night at Alcatraz, I want to go to Wrigley Field and Fenway Park. I want to go on a Bigfoot expedition. I want to sing the National Anthem at a ball game. Maybe I will find time. Maybe I will make the most of my time. And I am sure I could find some more "time cliches" to write. But now is not the time.