Allons enfants de la patrie, le jour de gloire est arrivé!

Email from my lawyer:  The check (amount as yet unknown) of my insurance settlement is in the mail.  Time now to do everything, spend as much as I can before the remainder goes into a trust fund (in order not to lose my welfare benefits)--I think I have two or three weeks. 

So, before I leap into the abyss, a pause, to render thanks and to reflect.  I was looking towards a fairly miserable end of life--without so much as a piano to compose, and play Bach and Haydn on, or a decent sound system to hear music on.  That would have been indeed a grim final decade (between now and, say, I figure, outside, 85 years old).  So while I'm at it (buying musical stuff), I'll get me a nice chest of recorders and see about connecting up with that amateur recorder-playing society here in Honolulu.  If I want to. Then, of course, there's all that software, and printing apps that I'll need to download my inspirations (if I have any) directly from my (I incline, thus far) Casio weighted-touch electric piano.

And then--while fully conscious of my being charity (else there had been no insurance settlement)--Is there not a certain amount that I might contribute to diminish the cruelty (especially to children and animals--say, an anti-circumcision or an anti-corporal punishment fund, or a Yemeni, Libyan and/or Afghan children's relief fund) of the world I am about to depart from?  When you think of the horrors the United States and its NATO allies are, even as we speak, perpetrating in those countries, you'd think (would you not?) that People of Conscience would be finding ways to mitigate and alleviate them--if not, for some reason, entirely forbear from perpetrating them.