an eight letter word for difficult.....

I found an advantage to being an old fart

     I was doing a crossword puzzle today when I ran across the clue:  Friday player.  Now there is lots you could read into this, but I had and idea it was not sports related.
     Four letters, ends in b....so I thought it was Webb.
     Now for those of you under 50, Jack Webb was Sgt. Joe Friday in Dragnet.  Long before Mash, (he was Col. Potter) Harry Morgan was a TV star as Friday's right hand, Joe Gannon.    I remember watching our little black and white TV as the pair solved all sorts of crimes in LA.  Car thefts, missing dogs, stolen purses.....I don't remember any murders because back then people didn't kill each other.
     Friday and Gannon would do a 30 minute show, and the longest sentence must have been five words.  They gave meaning to staccato.
     I notice that lots of crossword puzzle clues are aimed at my generation.  There is never one on Lady Gaga or Beyonce, but movies and shows from the 50s and 60s and even 70s seem to be fertile field.
     I guess  the Simpsons show up.....seem to remember a clue that was something like:  Homer's bartender.
     The early shows are in my memory.  The new ones are not.
     My mind is like a Rolodex.  (OK, that was a round spindle on a wheel device with index cards that held names, addresses and phone numbers of business contacts.) At some point it gets full, something has to be tossed.
     Full?  Forget that.  Time magazine said the human brain has a capacity equal to 1 million gigabytes of hard drive on a computer.
     So maybe it's not full yet.  But the Rolodex has some cards that have not been used for a while, and I think they got tossed.
     As I sat on the porch this morning, sipping a pumpkin latte from Cypress House, I remembered how much I enjoy this time of year.  The crispness at night, the mild days, the quietness of the neighborhood....it was hard to concentrate on my puzzle.
     I also realized how fortunate I am.  I have fairly good health, a comfortable life, a wife who can still walk, children who are doing well, friends who put up with me.
     In a puzzle, the clue would be:  eight letter word describing my life.
     The answer would be: Thankful