CARLTON FLETCHER: Even in her time of weakness, Robin Elmore gives her friends strength

And your mementos will turn to dust, but that’s the price you pay. Every year’s a souvenir that slowly fades away.

— Billy Joel

As I write this, a piece of my heart is with Robin Elmore at Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital.

Robin is in the process of getting her affairs in order after being told by her doctor that her time left in this world is limited. Robin is in the latter stages of lung cancer, and that insidious bastard of a disease has done what nothing else has ever been able to do.

Slow her down.

Robin is the sister of businesswoman/Albany City Commissioner B.J. Fletcher, and while many who don’t know Elmore will doubt this, she’s always held her own with her perpetual-motion sibling when it comes to abundant energy supply. I met Robin while writing a story about Dougherty School Board member-elect Melissa Strother’s “Littlest Libraries” program. An avid reader, Elmore told me that she wanted to put up one of the little libraries as a tribute to her favorite grammar school teacher, who encouraged her love for reading.

I think what stuck with me most after meeting Elmore was her attitude. She’d recently been diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer — for the uninformed, that’s about as bad a prognosis as you can get — and many of those in her circle of family, friends and acquaintances were devastated. Not Robin. A Registered Nurse who’d treated patients at the hospital where she now lays in the Intensive Care Unit, she talked openly about her diagnosis and how she planned to fight it.

But, more than that, she talked about the things she wanted to do. She and B.J. were going to spend some time traveling to little out-of-the-way places on “picking” expeditions, looking for treasures that she could restore and sell. Her eyes lit up with the passion that is a Fletcher family trait when she talked about the possibilities.

I got a call from Robin a few weeks ago, which was unusual because while I was immediately taken with her outgoing personality and larger-than-life persona and found that we could carry on a conversation without any of that getting-to-know-someone awkwardness, I certainly hadn’t done anything to earn a place within her close circle of friends. I soon discovered that the call was all too appropriate, though.

“You’ll never guess what I found today,” she said, and the excitement in her voice was unmistakable. She went on to tell me about finding an old working scale like the kind used in another era to weigh cotton at market. Robin had set her sights on finding one of the bygone-era apparatuses as soon as she and her sister decided that they would go on treasure-hunting trips. That she found one and paid only 40-something dollars for it was only part of her triumph.

“I found where I could sell it for …” (I won’t reveal the amount because Robin bought the scales in the region, and I’d hate for anyone to think they’d gotten taken. Suffice it to say it was a whole lot more than she paid for it.)

It’s that little-girl excited voice of Robin’s that I’ll always remember from now on when I think of her. While others in her circle were fretting over her obviously deteriorating health, she was enjoying the fact that she’d had a stellar picking outing.

I’ve never really been accused of being a deep thinker, but I’ve no doubt Robin’s scale story contains a lesson that would benefit us all. We’ve all heard the platitudes warning of the brevity of life, and we’ve all been told not to waste any of the time that we’re allotted. But we, being the humans that we are, tend to see life through the rose-colored lenses of our omnipotence and our eternity. Despite much evidence to the contrary, we think we’re forever.

So why do today what we can put off until tomorrow, whether it’s a chore we don’t really want to tackle or an adventure that we’re foregoing while we wait for the right time?

If that’s your MO, learn a lesson that Robin Elmore taught me. The right time is always now. It’s all we have.