The Times of Your Life

By Jon Foyt

From Delphi, Greece, to Colorado, to Roseburg, Oregon, to the terrors of Homeowners Associations, and the Post-World War II American shortage of lumber to build the houses for returning veterans, these short stories offer random readings on random subjects, to be read randomly.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jon Foyt
• Release date: Jul 3, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465721792

Jon Foyt

Striving for new heights on the literary landscape, along with his late wife Lois, Jon Foyt began writing novels 20 years ago, following careers in radio, commercial banking, and real estate. He holds a degree in journalism and an MBA from Stanford and a second masters degree in historic preservation from the University of Georgia. An octogenarian prostate cancer survivor, Jon is a runner, hiker and political columnist in a large active adult retirement community near San Francisco.

Book preview

The Times of Your Life

Random Writings, Chosen at Random, that can be Read Randomly

Copyright 2011 by

Lois Foyt and Jon Foyt

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2011 by Lois Foyt and Jon Foyt

All characters in these short stories are fictitious, and any resemblance to real persons living or dead is coincidental.

The authors’ website.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. Thank you for respecting the hard work of these authors.

Discover other titles by Lois Foyt and Jon Foyt at Smashwords.com

Last Train from Mendrisio

Red Willow Brew

Marathon, My Marathon

Postage Due

The Test of Time

The Landscape of Time

The Portrait of Time

The Architecture of Time

Time is Our Friend

(Most of the Time)

Time presents us with a universe of thought. Peering back into what some call the infinity of time, we have the opportunity to empathize with those who have lived before us, not only our own ancestors but those many and diverse lives that sculpted world history—not just the stories of kings and queens, generals with their wars and politicians with their cleverness, but the uphill climb of those real persons who, working against the formidable social and business constraints of their times, created new concepts in science, society, medicine, the arts and transportation.

Reading primary sources such as their personal journals, their memoirs, and their exchanges of letters with others allows us glimpses into the machinations of their minds, impressionist pictures of their spiritual and behavioral beliefs. Such sources describe their hopes and allow us to fear their failures and share their successes. Extrapolating their personal stories into the present time and even out into the future gives us a thrill of times that may come and that we may experience. Empathy with them living in their time allows us to develop a feel for our own time and the limits imposed upon us by society’s many institutions and accompanying restrictions, and by those we impose on our own selves, limiting our vision, or hopefully freeing it.

That time is money is a slogan of commerce and industry and old-fashioned factory assembly lines as money rules our lives rendering us its obedient servant.

This same commerce has wished upon us the rule of retirement, so that we do not hinder emerging ideas for commerce and throw up roadblocks to the volcano-like momentum introduced by the bubbling energy of each new generation. Yet to acquiesce to this time called retirement dulls the excitement of time, and then time ceases to be our friend.

However if we view retirement not as our pesonal withdrawal from challenges but rather as the sight of enticing new horizons, then once again time becomes our friend.

The House of Blue Lights

Outside of town, down a remote road that led to no known place, there hid, so the legend goes, an old house whose eves were strung with strings of blue light bulbs, each one of which cast—so the legend warned—a weird and ghostly spell upon those who dared to approach close enough in the hours long after dark had tinted in ice-cold colors this House of Blue Lights’ rural Indiana situs.

The place was not so far away by car as to require a long journey, rather a more driving resolve of achieving this destination, plus for safety the accompaniment of supportive friends as one, in daring do, undertook this frightening mission of creeping up upon this bluish and so-it-was-said the floating and almost ghost-like amorphous haze that engulfed The House of Blue Lights.

Who, assuming they were a living person or persons, lived or moved ghost-like inside this house? And if we went there and summoned enough courage to move through the haze and knock on the door, who was to open the door and, hopefully and fearfully, respond to the questions to which we all needed answers?

The person or thing that might open the door in response to our hesitant knock could be possessed with either great wisdom or great terror for us standing, hopeful but helpless, before it, waiting…. Perhaps these two traits of good and evil might display