I’m Not Dead

 

TODAY IS A SPECIAL DAY FOR ME. It is yet another birthday. This one marks the end of my 73^rd year on this earth.

Each of those years has had things worth remembering – and things that have merited forgetting. I’m sure that holds true for everyone. It’s part of the ongoing flow of life.

This past year has been much like many of my recent years. It held joys and sorrows, hopes fulfilled and hopes filled with disappointment. Dreams and nightmares, laughs and tears.

In many ways, some say too many, I am much the same person I was fifty or more years ago. I am 73, but I don’t feel or think like the cliché that I hold in my head about how a 73 year old man must be. According to that stereotype I should be a man who is quiet, content to relive my past, and not have the emotions, desires and hungers of a younger man. Well, sorry to disappoint the caricaturist of old age, but my heart and soul still crave, yearn, and lust like I did at 23. I still feel the need to explore, to discover, and to embrace life in all its flintlike hardness and caressing softness.

I am not ready, as Dylan Thomas said, “to go gentle into that good night.” I pray that I never will. There are too many things to do, to see, to create, and to absorb for me to willingly surrender to the night.

Over my 73 years I have made many mistakes and I’m sure that I will make more, but how else can I recognize any successes except in contrast to the failures.

I know that I have hurt people along the way, not intentionally, but some were unavoidable. I have been hurt and I know, at least I hope, that there was no malice involved. In any case, all of the people I have known and loved still travel with me and stay in my mind and heart, if no longer in my arms.

Tomorrow I will start on my way through the maze of another year. There will be twists and turns, good days and bad, tears of laughter and some of sorrow. Sunshine and rain.

I hope that I am prepared for whatever comes. There will be fewer surprises I’m sure, and seeing some things again can be wonderful the second time around.

I will take it all one day, one hour, one minute at a time. My first step, however, is to blow out some candles and make a wish.

A Limerick

Today is a day just for me

As my calendar says 7 – 3

I’m older than dirt

Most everything hurts

But I still have both of my knees

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