Steve Moseley

You learn a lot in 7.5 decades of pedestrian life. Some nuggets of enlightenment are small, others anything but. Here are a few that pop to mind as the sand of life trickles away.

Offered in no particular order:

• Do not obtain employment as a young, strapping grocery store meat cutter during the pre-boxed beef, full carcass era if you hope to have functioning back, knees, shoulders and hands in your 60s and 70s. Bad plan. Bad. Bad. Bad.

Two ruined shoulders, painful sciatica, one cartilage-free, bone-on-bone knee, two detached biceps and a prosthetic hip — fault for the latter of which lies with an escaping wiener dog and not the meat industry — are daily annoyances.

• Do not absentmindedly straddle a roadkill boar coon at highway speed with a ground-hugging 2013 Nissan Maxima in Wyoming when it’s way below freezing. Sounded like a Vietnam-era, Army basic training artillery pit going off. The sudden impact damned near catapulted us into opposing traffic.

I bet there’s still raccoon DNA on the oil pan, though perhaps it has burned off in the years since this lesson was imparted the hard way. Like plowing into a concrete block, except larger.

• Be sure to ball your fist up real tight if you get into a fight. Took this lesson in high school. Even should you win, you could be the one sent to a big city orthopedic surgeon to have a broken, displaced bone in your hand surgically extracted, then pinned back together and sewn closed.

The fishhook shaped pin is still in there. This dumb stunt cost me all but the first couple games of my senior football season as a feared (tee hee) Genoa Oriole.

• Don’t even think about retiring without first learning to say “No!” however many times it takes. And mean it. I speak to this one from experience. An audit of my own post-retirement hobby jobs runs to six at last count: four paid, two volunteer. “Do as I say, not as I do,” was never more apropos.

• Do not, regardless how maddeningly firm the butter may be, slather it on the bread in great, thick chunks and then put it in the toaster, better to multi-task. Please do not ask how I know this to be a keenly ill-thought-out, greasy idea. Who knew?

• Here’s a helpful tip I learned just this winter: Do you, like so many of us, suffer gender perplexion or social discomfort in public restrooms during these confusing times? If so, when scurrying across Nebraska on I-80 to get somewhere — anywhere — else, you may obtain momentary relief from your angst (and other more basic needs) by stopping at Cunningham’s Journal on the Lake at the Kearney exchange (turn west on Talmadge Street, keep an eye peeled to your left). There you will find an entire hallway lined with nothing but individual, one-holer potty closets: four on each side for a generous total of eight; no gender-specific door signs to be seen.

Just like the comforts of home, when a door is open, simply step in and lock it behind you. This was a first for me. A real stunner. I thought it a simple and clever solution to an increasingly volatile issue. And dining is first class at Cunningham’s, too, which is a nice bonus. They take walk-ins. Mose says check ‘em out.

• Do not let fellow freshman year college dorm rats influence you to smoke Marlboro reds. Thirty-five years of pack-a-day puffing later, I finally kicked the rancid, filthy things. By then I was long-since weaned, of economic necessity, from Marlboros. Way too expensive. The black-on-white packs labeled Generic served nearly as well.

One benefit I anticipated after giving butts the boot, however, did not come to pass. I figured it would require a periodic cull of the inevitable wad of accumulated cash not spent on butts to get my wallet to fold over again. Didn’t happen.

Tune in again for Part II when we’ll hear Steve advise the youngsters, “Be sure your guard is up when you buy that first car. Mine didn’t make the 15.9 miles home from the dealer in 1965. There I sat alongside the road, dead-sticked and stranded, my pocket lighter to the tune of $250. Folks, that’s $2,504.80 in 2025 money. If that mattered. Which it doesn’t.”