A Word About The Top Shelf

A Word About the Top Shelf

I figure after all these months of me spoutin' my opinions, observations an' rants from my place up on the top shelf, I should say a word or two about its place in my life. An old Ojibway Elder friend of mine used to refer to this part of my life as the slow slope down the last hill of our journey on this earth. Well, THAT just sucks! It's right up there on a par with "These are the golden years". Yeah - right.

The whole business started when I seen our picture sittin' on the top shelf of somebody's bookcase somewhere's an' I thought to myself that this was a good omen_ sittin' way up there lookin' down on everybody's foibles an' follies an' havin' a good laugh about it. It provides a degree of separation between the observer an' the observed. Well you gotta know we're the ones who provided the pictures in the first place, frames an all, so you get some idea of who these people might be. There was a time when we were important in their lives to one degree or another. In fact, we may have exercised some influence on them from time to time.  At that time our pictures would'a sat on the mantle or maybe even on a coffee table. Of course now they need that space for their own pictures, or their children's pictures - so we get moved up progressively until we reach the very top shelf on top o' the bookcase.

You'd think on the face of it, we are bein' relegated to oblivion, waitin' for the grim reaper. Ha ha! They forget that it was people like us who made them what they are. Do they really think we're gonna stop now? Not on yer life! We can just smile down on them while they make the same stupid mistakes we did an' go "tut, tut", purposely forgettin' our own follies of another era.

Come to think of it, we've got photos of our parents and grandparents hangin' up on the wall in the bedroom above the closet door. Well it ain't a bookcase but it's just as high up. Neither one of us think about them a great deal neither. They're just there in case we wanna have a look once in a while an reminisce. Then we go on with our business. I guess that's what the children and grandchildren do. At least that's how it seems to me from up here on the top shelf.

Just sayin'.