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My Take

Regrets

Mark McGee
Posted 9/17/22

“Regrets, I’ve had a few, but then again, too few to mention”, penned Paul Anka in the song “My Way” made famous by the legendary singer Frank Sinatra.  

Well, …

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My Take

Regrets

Posted

“Regrets, I’ve had a few, but then again, too few to mention”, penned Paul Anka in the song “My Way” made famous by the legendary singer Frank Sinatra.  

Well, I have more than a few regrets and I feel moved by events of the past couple of weeks to mention some of them.  

I have heard people say they regret what they didn’t do more than some of the things they have done. And while I have regrets of both omission and commission, it is the things I didn’t do that are on my mind the most.  

First, with my father, dealing with cancer that is not going to end well, I regret we haven’t been closer. We have always been quite different people with vastly different interests. In his final weeks it is on my mind more about my failure to have not tried harder to find more common ground.  

A lesser regret is I never took a photo of him with his black Chevrolet truck. It is his calling card. Most people associate him with that truck. Badly in need of restoration he steadfastly refused to do anything with it from a cosmetic standpoint.  

Along similar lines I regret that when my daughter was four or five years old, I did not watch her help her great-grandmother play bingo at what was then Glen Oaks Nursing home. I believe it was each Wednesday when bingo would be played with little prizes awarded to the winners.  

I still have a small wreath with a painted wooden dog face hanging from it to remind me not to let events, no matter how small, pass me by.  

I was planning to watch them play after my daughter, my mother and I returned from a trip to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. On the second day of our road trip my grandmother passed away, a reminder we don’t have all the time in the world to do things.  

When my daughter’s mother was pregnant, I was less than excited about the news. I was scared of having to be responsible for another human being and selfishly I wondered how it was going to change my life. I didn’t revel in all of the prenatal events the way I should have. But when I saw my daughter’s face for the first time I was hooked for life.  

There are more regrets, better saved to write about at another time.  

Another old saying is the older we get the more we dwell on our regrets. Henry David Thoreau, who included philosopher among his many talents in the 1800s, wrote “To regret deeply is to live afresh”.  

If that is true, then each day is fresh for me.