Smart and Dumb.

I've had a helluva month. 

Not bad, just exhausting.

And long.

I didn't realize until recently when I read Paul Fussell's "The Great War and Modern Memory," when TS Eliot wrote the line "April is the cruellest month," it was an allusion to the upswelling of killings in World War I. Winter was over, the days were growing longer and the killing was easy. Ahhhh, Spring.

This April (and March) weren't cruel, just long.

Since March 21, when my second grandson was born, I've been as busy as the only serrated knife at an Oneg Shabbat. 

Not only am I am in the middle of producing seven commercials for two different clients, I am constantly pitching and losing and pitching and winning. Also, pitching and winning and then finding the client is cold-feeting. I guess that's why they call it the agony of de-feet.

I also had a near death experience on the New England Thruway in southern Connecticut. My car, I was going 75, so about 20 mph slower than everyone else, suddenly shifted into neutral and I couldn't get it in gear. Fortunately, I squeezed into an exit and got the thing re-engaged on a service road before I was flattenized by a Peterbilt. 

I dropped the old machine off at a dealer just twenty miles away and they were nice enough to loan me a 2025 for the thousands I spent getting my old jalopy back into fighting trim. I also picked up my California-daughter who was in-town to visit her new nephew. 

Of course, I also had cataracts removed in each eye. That entails a lasering of one eye, followed by a lasering of the other a week later. Plus 14 drops in each eye each day. Plus the general discomfort of sleeping with a plastic eye shield. And my unshakeable supposition that my wife is planning to replace one of those therapeutic drops with extract of cayenne pepper, battery acid, onion juice or something slightly less benign.

Along the way, the press of client work and keeping a lot circulating and hoping nothing drops. Not to mention my daily routine of blogging and promoting GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company. 

My dour side says this isn't quite how I planned to spend my dotage. I thought I had a chance to be an elder states-person at Ogilvy and spend my waning years working to train people and to help out on difficult clients and on pitches. That's what I was hoping for. But agencies decided they no longer need experience anymore, so I am beating the bushes like an old vaudevillian hoping a full-house in Altoona gets me a week in Toledo.

I grew up with a father who was an extremely hard worker. I supposed I picked up my work ethic from him and some others who showed me that the application of schnozz to grindstone could lead to diamond not rhinestone. 

The hard part of all that, of course, is that many people like myself who were brought up working hard never learned an alternative. Never even learned that the world would keep on if you weren't always lending a hand and a check to grease the skids for someone you care for.

In all the years I played baseball, I never learned to hit to the opposite field. In all the years I've worked, I've never learned to not work.

You can spend a life time being smart.

Only to find out you're really dumb.