Soap Box

On the 28th of October, something will happen that I can look at in one of two ways. I can view it as simply turning 79 or I can take the philosophical route and say that it is the onset of my octogenarian era, the beginning of my 80th year.

Actually, it doesn't really make a farthings worth of difference which way I consider it, it still means that I am getting rather elderly, although, in horse years I'd be around 560-years-old which I guess proves there are still some advantages of being a homo sapien, chronology notwithstanding.

Looking back at the almost eight decades of my life, I can't imagine being alive in a more progressive or exciting time as I have seen the advent of incredible discoveries and inventions, some wonderful and encouraging and some frightening and intimidating.

I have seen the means to cure and prevent some of the most catastrophic diseases, sicknesses that had plagued man for millennia, maladies that had wiped out goodly portions of nations
brought to heal in a test tube by some of the best and brightest among us.

I remember the arrival of jet travel which shrunk continents and made even the furthest destination a plane ride away.

From a distance, I witnessed the bombing of Pearl Harbor, D-Day, the day the Hitler committed suicide in a bunker in Berlin, and that awful day in 1944 that signaled a mass destruction the world had never known, when the first atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, ending, in one day a part of the war that could have gone on for much longer.

The first automatic transmission I was ever aware of belonged to a Naval officer who lived across the street who came home from the war missing a leg.

I was around for the building and tearing down of the Berlin wall, the rebirth of the State of Israel, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassination of a president and the destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

I saw my first picture on a television set when I was around 14, about the same time I learned the three chords on Russell Palmer's old beat up Stella guitar that would change my life.

I've seen computer technology progress from what was once a good sized room full of electronics to a device you can hold in the palm of your hand that contains the knowledge of Planet Earth at the touch of a screen.

God has blessed me with seeing so much of His creation, I've worked in all fifty states and many other nations, seen the sites in the tourist brochures and the little visited back road places where an America that once was, still exists.

I've ridden on an Eskimo dog sled in Greenland, crossed into East Berlin at Checkpoint Charlie, punched cattle in the big bend, got shot at one night in a helicopter over Iraq, fished the teeming waters of Alaska when the salmon were running, climbed to the top of the light house at Cape Hatteras and stood atop Mount Carmel in Israel and looked across the Valley of Megiddo where the final battle will take place.

I have been happily married for fifty-one years, have one son who has been an absolute joy to his mother and me and two �grandchildren� that Hazel and myself unofficially adopted, who brought another dimension to our lives and thirty employees who are my extended family.

I live between two patches of wood and if I want to walk out on my back porch before I get dressed in the morning nobody is non the wiser.

I travel around one hundred thousand miles a year, play a little north of one hundred concerts and ten Grand Ole Opry appearances a year.

I would not trade jobs or lives with anybody on this earth.

I've had a few health bumps along the road but for the most part I'm pretty healthy for a �hard rode, put up wet� 78, soon to be 79-year-old semi-cowboy.

I attribute every breath, every heartbeat and every good thing that has ever happened to me to a blessing of Almighty God.

Live your lives folks you'll only have one, make it a good �un.

What do you think?

Pray for our troops and the peace of Jerusalem.

God Bless America

� Charlie Daniels

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