I can still feel glimmers of embarassment

Maybe it's the age thing ... maybe me ... but I don't typically feel much embarassment ... betimes, transient glimmers. By the time I and maybe others, too, reach the Last Quarter, we've been penetrated through just about every orifice .... "Howard .... Relax. Lie on your side and take a deep breath. This won't hurt" says the doctor with a gloved hand either with or without one of the tools of the Inquisition .... "Howard, did you blaspheme, today?" .... "Anything but the proctoscope" .... "Anything?" ... Well. .......................... All this is to say that my Crotchety Old Man rant yesterday about WORDS left me embarassed for the only time I can remember since my Mother found Margaret and I playing Show and Tell ... Well! Show and Show ... in the back yard maybe in 1951. .................... Railing at House Members and Doctors like Old Mr. Engler on W. 5th Street in Coney Island who would shake his cane at the kids on their steel-wheeled roller skates. I've become Mr. Engler! ..... "Own up to it, Howard, you are Mr. Engler, may his Soull and Memory be for Blessing." (LOL for some morbid reason.) ...........................  To rant and rail? or not to rant, at all! Aye! that is a more or less irrelevant question. I find the urge almost uncontrollable. Am I shaking my cane, so to speak, like the Colonial poet Edward Taylor who penned: "A fig to thee, Oh Death"? Am I pissed about being in the first pew? about being abandoned as an orphan by my parents who swore to me they wouldn't move the umbrella and it was safe to go in the water ... they'd be there when I came back? ........................ I dunno. But by the Fourth Quarter there seems to be simultaneously less sensitivity to the slings and arrows of Playing in the Big City ... and more sensitivity, too. ........................... Heading up with M for Special Persons' Day at some of our grandkids' religious schools 350 miles North. There, too, there'll be a splitting in the meaning of the words SPECIAL PERSONS. To my grandson who I'll follow (M will follow our grand-daughter) I'll be that maybe embarassing piece of history ... of his unique history ... his story. To the school, I'll be a potential donor, hopefully who still remembers that 'Tis, indeed, a gift to be special ... and to carry a checkbook. ........................ Don't get cynical, H!

........................................ Time for a road trip, Old Man!