I was going to open this with a litany of the most recent travesties committed by the revolving cast of the most awful people in the world, but if you read this, you also read the papers and thus do not need, on this blue-sky day, another reminder of what such monsters did yesterday or last night.
This post is about laying hold of life in spite of them and every other prognosis of disaster.
I was walking out of the grocery store this morning and a man called my name. I did not recognize him, white-haired, sun glassed, smiling, but he knew me, introduced himself and in our brief exchange told me that 13 months before he had had a week to live. Then, he received a lung transplant. We wished each other well and moved on.
I’m turning 70 in a few days, and I am grateful for the good fortune that has seen me to this point relatively unscathed. I like to take actions that give me control of my surroundings, but I know that ‘belief’ is an illusion I try to hold at bay through a sense of order. The universe does not give one flying f*** about me, and the only reason I’m still shuffling around is because I’ve had a couple of good doctors, two good marriages, sometimes quick reflexes, pretty good intuition about people, an inherited Irish gift for spinning a story and an ocean’s worth of undeserving luck whose waves continue to break on shore as I type this.
I am grateful that I am upright and mobile and that my body and mind are humming along in tandem, but of course, because I am a human being and therefore incapable of satisfaction, and by nature unable to be sedentary, it ain’t enough. I want more.I want to write more, see more, exercise more, drive to Kansas, move to Maine, spend time with my brother and sister and nieces and nephews, walk about the West, meet strangers, listen to their stories, learn enough ancient Greek to read a smidgen of The Iliad, talk face-to face with my friends from India, watch birds, and feel the good Sun on my face.
I do not have much time left, but I want to live as if I do.
