and wash your face

Hopefully anticipating our hour walk this morning. Wednesday schedule is walk then breakfast, whether it happens depends, like everything else in life. One factor is always the weather: raining, we cancel. I’m up for walking in near-freezing temperature, as about 32F at the moment. We’ll see. Including the Monday/Wednesday walk, the exercise program is part of my fight to stay alive long enough to ring in the Second Coming. Tuesday/Friday it’s work up a sweat at Chuck’s Cardio, but cancelled yesterday because. Mistake of taking the carvedilol sooner rather than later, extreme dizziness even though taken with two scrambled eggs and toast. Whine, whine.

Someone said getting old is for the birds. I’m finding it’s for old men. I’m 79. Here’s my picture at 19 just home from my sophomore year at UFlorida. It was 1955, I arrived home from Gainesville with my first crew cut, and mama hustled me off to Olan Mills to immortalize it.

My next crewcut was the second day of Navy OCS, Newport, Rhode Island, summer 1957. Navy barbershop, half dozen barbers zipping through a couple hundred college graduates in about thirty minutes. They left one long hair on the back of my head, ridiculous and I jerked it out. I wish I had that hair back.

Actually, this was going to be about Ash Wednesday, wasn’t it. The drum I beat on Ash Wednesday is the ludicrosity of our hearing this gospel verse from Matthew 6:16-18 “And whenever you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces so as to show others that they are fasting. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, so that your fasting may be seen not by others but by your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you” and then parading about with ashes smudged on our foreheads. 

But I’m not going there this morning. Get your ashes 

and show off all day for all I care. You have your reward: people will notice.

W+