It’s About Time

Thoughts From the Front Porch

Mar 29, 2025

Thoughts From the Front Porch…

Time is flying faster than a Space X rocket. Somehow we have rocketed from New Year’s Eve to the end March, the first quarter. January and February are now just blurry memories. And March is determined to expire soon. How did I miss the Ides of March? As of this day, 28 days of March have passed. Six hundred and seventy-two hours have lapsed. That’s 40,320 fleeting seconds.

Wait. What?

I lost you at the Ides of March?

Oh, let me explain.

The Roman calendar marked the Idus of Martius. Idus means roughly the middle of the month. Martius became March on the Gregorian calendar, which made the 15th day the Ides of March.

While today, March means St. Patrick’s Day, which has passed, or March Madness or Lent, both of which are still on going.

But in the day’s of the Roman Empire the middle day in the month of March had a sinister reputation.

Since my grades school years, I recall the saying, “Beware of the Ides of March.”

That was advice that Julius Caesar should have taken. You see, on March 15, 44 BC, Caesar, the military leader and dictator of the Roman Republic was stabbed to death.

An Article in the Enquirer, that’s the Cincinnati Enquirer, says other infamous events occurred on March 15: Adolf Hitler invaded parts of Czechoslovakia and SARS was declared a “worldwide health threat.”

Here are some of the actual events from the Ides of March in 2025.

In the Myanmar civil war, at least 27 people were killed and 30 others injured in an airstrike by the Tatmadaw near Manbdalay, Myanmar.

In the Sudanese civil war, the bodies of eleven people, including women and children were discovered at the bottom of a well in Khartoum, Sudan.

The death toll from the tornado outbreak in the U.S. rose to 34.

For more than 200 members of the Tren de Aragua gang, it was their last day in the U.S. before President Trump deported them, sending them to prisons in El Salvador and Honduras.

I’m sure a lot of great and wonderful things happened on March 15, 2025, but, as you know, they don’t report safe landings of airplanes. Bad news rules.

Elon Musk can send a rocket into space and bring it back safely. But he can’t recapture the days gone by.

So, we will be saying goodbye to March next week.

Go Fly a Kite

As a youngster in West Virginia, March seemed always to be a windy month. That’s the time of year when the colder air clashes with warmer air and generates windy conditions.

We would take our paper kites and all the twine we could scrounge and head to the nearest hilltop open field. Up there we were away from all of the dangerous power lines and we could send our kites as far as the string would allow.

Sometimes we had store-bought kites that cost something less than a dollar, or we would make our own out of newspapers and sticks.

That was great fun. Kid’s don’t know how to fly kites or make them these days.

That’s a shame.

One More Thing… About Time

Speaking of the passing of time, I’ve passed my 75th birthday. I would have thought it would have taken longer to get this old.

My best by date has passed. All of my warranties have expired.

But I’m so blessed that sometimes I feel guilty.

As I look back, there are a lot of things I would change if I could, but if any of those changes would have altered where I am today, I’m very happy I didn’t make different choices.

What’s Next on the Calendar

You also might want to be aware that April 1, April Fool’s Day is approaching rapidly.

Now There’s a Thought

A friend said he has quit wearing his glasses. He said he has seen enough.

Question:

If a saw horse breaks its leg, do I have to shoot it?

Let me share a few photos that bless me…