If you're reading this, I'd like to think you were open-minded and moving through your fifties or sixties. If a good long life is 84 years (four score and four .... about the time it took a fledgling democracy to produce the Gettysburg Address), then the Fourth Quarter begins at 63 or thereabouts. Need I add that we have no way to know for certain how much time we have left (one of the curses of awareness ... knowing that we don't know) .... My grandchildren are keenly aware that I'm -- in the order of things -- next to go, so to speak ... that I'm an orphan ... that I strain when I do hard labor around the house and that grandma is forever warning me not to work too hard (more about that later) ... and that I'm a little slow on the comeback (more on processing speed, later, too).
If I didn't get their message loud and clear, just last night, my middle child, M (I'll call my kids F,M, and L for First, Middle and Last), called to say hello and talk about things ...
He referenced some "Old Person ... mid-60's, you'know."
I know, I responded, "some Old Person in their Mid-Sixties. Yeah."
I went on pretty quietly to a-hem in his direction ... "some Old Person in their Mid-Sixties. Yeah" said at least one more time and then decided to write a first posting to this Blog.
He was, after all, saying things that I couldn't refute. It had been a few days shy of nine weeks ago that I slipped in the garden after the Biblical rains of August had molded up the stepping stones out back. I thought nothing of it. Four days later, after a quiet dinner with L and her husband and three kids and Marsha (the lady whose been magically waking up next to me for 46 years), I, within the space of an hour, realized that falls have consequences. By 9 pm, I had been trucked to a nearby ER and shot-up with Dilaudid. The pain was sufficiently severe and the drug sufficiently disorienting that, not only couldn't I walk or move or think straight, but I could report to the Attending that I was indeed high for the first time since the Sixties but the pain was unchanged. He was mildly amused ... the way Young Guys respond to an Old Guy.
Within another four or five days, the herniation of L4-5 had been diagnosed ... the delay was due to Insurance Company regs. I explained to the surgeon -- about to give me a first epidural shot -- who was a mature almost-half-my-age and no less than an oldest-grandchild less than M in age that I was disappointed that I had no good story to tell my grandchildren, friends or patients to go along with my injury ... no "hey, no biggie, happened on second tour in Nam ... during the Tet Offensive" ... instead of .... "slipped on my left buttocks in the garden." Telling stories, just maybe, is part of the Good (Old) Life.
So, Middle Child M was right. I've gone from being a young snot-nose to being a vigorous person to being "some Old Person in their Mid or Late Sixties" ... and I've done so in a flash.
Things have changed ... in the World and in me in the past three quarters of a life. And while I haven't heard a call for a two minute warning, too often, I thought it time to record some of my experiences and call out to those who are parallel-playing in their own last quarter to comment along side of me.
By the by, I know there are those, like the lady behind the gym counter, who frequently are moved to say: "hey, y'gotta be positive." I do agree ... and still I'm a'mind to think there has to be room to discuss all sides of gettin' on, light and dark.
It is my intention to post every other day but, hey, it was my intention to begin posting to this Blog in August.
Till then.
