It's approaching the Four Year Anniversary ... of my beginning to write down these thoughts about living in the Fourth and Last Quarter of Life.
It was the 16th of October in the year 2011.
And no god spake unto Howard, saying:
"Write down ye thoughts, Brother!"
It was four years ago, some 9 weeks after the fall in the Garden that changed my habit of occasionally writing a ditty ... a bit of doggerel ... about the accumulating years on my Birthday Cards into this more frequent and formal -- still sometimes humorous but occasionally and arguably MORBID -- set of reflections on my dotage. I began:
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).
Zo! Now, being maybe 3 Blog Postings away from my Happy 4th, it seems fitting to spend some time reflecting on these four years. I am committed to rereading the 400+ postings over these weeks ... I am a little fearful of what I'll find. If I'm true to my age, I fear, there shall have been a great deal of repetition ... telling the same story over-and-over, again ... Sorry, if that turns out to be true. M and my kids would tell us how my Dad would retell his jokes and his stories about being an older soldier in WW2. Similarly, I wish I could say that there hadn't been any changes in my functioning ... but there have been. My Driving has deteriorated ... ask M. My body has acquired new consultants ... among them, a kindly Cardio-Electrophysiologist who looks like he could date my oldest grandchild ... and others, too. My Pill Hotel has grown additional floors ... My Central Processing Unit has slowed ... and the Photographic Memory I once has dead spots on its hard-drive ... kinda like the Starter-Motor on a '56 Packard.
So, off I go ... Older than all the Republican Candidates for the 2016 Presidency ... still near the same age or younger than the leading three Democratic contenders ... Hillary, Joe and Old Man Bernie.
Off to reread my ramblings ... a little afraid of what I'll find.
