Double Overtime

Was reading a brief piece about a man that the online article claimed was the Oldest Man in the World. A Chemist, Dr. Imich who was in a horizontal position but still talking, had spent several years incarcerated in a WWII Russian Camp. The article avers that: "He thinks his longevity has to do with a combination of eating well, not drinking, being very active and not having children."

Formulas. How does someone get to be 111 ... smack-dab in the middle of the sixth quarter or double overtime? People seem to love formulaic answers to impossibly difficult questions. One octogenarian who used to visit my office, a physician, suffered to find an answer to what happens after death. He had kept notes of his fantasies for nearly 50 years about his fantasied journey with exotic images of people, places and things ... and lots of women. He was blessed with great intelligence from early on in life and felt ... no 'believed' ... that answers should be accessible to him that were inaccessible, or at least inaccessible to generations of most-likely equally intelligent Souls.

I sit here in my office opposite a wall full of books mostly written in the past 100 years. Then, there's my grandfather's bookcase that I received upon his death after his 99th birthday. Grandpa had filled it with the wisdom of his people's religious tradition and I reserve it for "the Sacred." Mostly Old Books and a scroll that he carried when he emigrated from Hungary a bit less than 100 years ago and that was, perhaps, his grandfather's. I think of myself as intelligent but am not confident that I'm anywhere but in the middle of the pack ... lower end? higher end? who the Hell knows .... somewhere under the normal curve.

So, Dr. Imich, I don't know what's helped me arrive into the middle of the Fourth Quarter. I haven't found any satisfying formulas. During Woodstock, M and I were caught up in traffic due to a concert that we might have known about were we not figuring out how to deal with two toddlers in diapers. Maybe had we not been foolish enough to have a second child 14 months after our first ... just maybe? we might've been caught up in some radical causes or worse? the drug world of the late 1960's. Nevermind that our third child, born some 9 years after her brothers, would have never been there and kept us from getting lost in other madnesses of early midlife. Life's the most glorious of all crap-shoots.

Deuteronomy says it simply: The apparent things are for us and our children (to know); the hidden matters are for the Master our God forever.

What are all those stories about climbers who crave the words of wisdom of some mountain-dwelling and saffron-robed Sage who utters -- after deep reflection ... "There's no free lunch." (I think that was Bill Cosby's version but I don't remember). But no matter how many times we/I hear it, we humanfolk expect to get what we cannot receive ... answers.

Indeed, the Wise tell us that we reap what we sow but for this Last Quarter player and many others, life has been full of surprises ... like one who scatters seeds of unknown origins and waits to see what will grow. When I moved into my office, I noticed that little Japanese Maple saplings were growing outside my office ... brought there in bird shit, perhaps, like the 60 foot Pin-Oak not far from that spot. I don't know but now 35 years later in Spring, the area outside my office is a Japanese Maple forest. I suspect there are visitors to my office who imagine that I planted those Maples.