Things I Don't Understand

 I'd like to consider myself a reasonably aware and somewhat intelligent person.  Even so, there are some things I just don't understand.

For example, when a Christian marries a Jew and converts to Judaism, how is it that a Christian who, for most of his or her life, has believed the Jesus is the Son of God, now demotes him to a mere prophet?  I can understand how a Jew converting to Christianity now believes the Jesus is God, but a Christian relegating Jesus to a mere prophet confuses me.

When I worked on street crews for our village during summers to earn money for college, we sometimes worked with concrete trucks that brought concrete to the sites.  The truck would have a chute in the back that the revolving drum would then use to deliver the concrete.  After I'd graduated law school, I saw that the chute now delivered from the front of the trucks.  Why?  How is that better?

Volleyball when I played it in gym class had a rotation system.  It also had a scoring system that only allowed the team serving could score a point.  Now it has a libero and points are scored regardless of which team is serving.  When did this change?

I love music.  I will never understand how songwriters come up with the beautiful melodies they do.  James Horner, Jerry Goldsmith, Hans Zimmer and others like them just mystify me.  What a wonderful gift they've been given.  

(c) 2026 The Truxton Spangler Chronicles

 

65

 Over the weekend I turned sixty-five.  I never pondered the age, but here we are.  I am officially eligible for social security and retirement, although I probably could have retired three years ago.  Funny thing is, I don't feel old at all.  I am the living embodiment of the adage that one can only be young once, but one can always be immature.  I am an eternal twelve-year-old.

But I got to thinking:  Even though the Greatest Generation gets the laurels -- rightly so -- in my humble existence I've seen a few things.  Here's a list of the things I've seen during my six decades on earth:

--  The Kennedy assassination (technically I was too young, but I was alive)

-- The Vietnam War

-- The MLK assassination

-- The RFK assassination

-- Man walking on the moon

-- The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan

-- Two Arab invasions of Israel

-- The Munich Olympic massacre

-- Test tube babies

-- Personal computers

-- Cellphones

-- The Gulf War

-- 9/11

-- First female presidential candidates

-- Death of Elvis

-- Compact discs

-- 8 tracks, cassettes, Blu rays, streaming 

-- Cubs won a World Series

--  Non-politician POTUS

-- First female, African American and Latino SCOTUS justices

-- Creation of the European Union

-- Downfall of the Soviet Union

The list is not exhaustive, obviously.  But in my short time on earth, I've seen some things.

What makes this list even more poignant is that today I found out today that a fifty-eight-year-old colleague died.

QDEP Brian...

(c) 2026 The Truxton Spangler Chronicles