90 & sinking
Ninety, I'm so glad to be ninety, retired and living in my own 7th Heaven. Paul didn't make it, he got caught up in the third heaven, so I reckon that was it for him, eh? I say "eh?" because I don't know and neither do you.
You can see by the birthday balloons that ninety is wearing and wearying, though. The balloons are turning out to be a good, better, best possible metaphor for life at ninety: up early, a nap before breakfast, a nap mid-morning, a nap following noon dinner (it's usually one o'clock or going on two o'clock, not noon though), early to bed and early to rise. This, four o'clock predawn darkness, is my best and only thinking Time of day, and that itself, like the 90 balloons, is sinking.
A fact of ninety, though, is that these are not short power naps but two hour naps, from which I wake feeling sleep-logged and dopey, not invigorated.
Two doctor appointments today. No, it's three, two for her and one for him. This is the five-or-six-monthly visit that I nearly always depart wearing a bandage and leaving pieces of my face behind. No matter: at ninety you don't rely on your face much anymore anyway, it's your charming character and pretense of wisdom that sees you through.
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Comparison, I'm comparing my life to the life of a friend in his sixties who's working too hard and miserably and has no clear plan for hanging it up and heading peacefully and quietly for ninety. The goal of life should be freedom from reliance on earning a paycheck. I retired from the Navy at forty-two, retired from parish ministry at sixty-three, retired from active retirement at, WTH was it -- eighty-eight.
Life is Good, in part because I don't watch television unless there's a hurricane in the Gulf. Decades ago when I paid bills every month it occurred to me that being "rich", "wealthy" is relative, not my bank account but relative, a personal perspective: to me, rich means no debt, pay off all that stuff, quit buying cars, downsize and minimize, and here we are, me ninety, nursing an eight year old car along; happy in the first class shabbiness of a small apartment furnished with things from our life and the lives of our parents and grandparents, and looking out across St Andrews Bay over Baker's Point into the eternity where, over a hundred years ago, the Annie & Jennie sailed the night that enabled my personal Being.
Home is where the heart is, mine's in 7H, four levels above Paul's.
Relief: yesterday morning I finished my commitment to lead a reading discussion of Mark and his gospel. Going six sessions instead of the four I originally intended, it was fun but enervating, draining, I'll not take that on again. In a couple of weeks I'll return to that room, expecting a much smaller group, for a one-session discussion of Secret Mark, which I've read and discussed in the same room but with different folks and a decade or more ago. Then, a couple weeks after that another single-session discussion of Matthew and his gospel just as the church shifts to Year A and reads snippets of Matthew through the year.
Shortly after class started yesterday morning, we were startled by a sudden huge blindingly fiery orange ball and deafening POP just outside the back door. It was the closest I ever hope to be to a lightning strike. Let me rephrase that: I hope never again to be that close to a lightning strike.
RSF&PTL
T90