Sunday Morning Meds--Hallelujah!

Seventeen years ago, on Easter, I witnessed this dawn.

“Praise the LORD, O my soul. Praise the LORD.”

Psalm 104

The truth is, I would have loved to play slo-pitch. 

A couple of years ago, a good friend, even older than I am, decided the college faculty should have an intramural softball team, the Geezers.  He organized it and now has them out on the field. Problem is, they got thumped in their first game, so he sent out an e-mail lookin’ for beefier hitters. Singles just don’t make it in slo-pitch.

Once upon a time, I slammed homers methodically, routinely—every other at bat almost.  Not a lie either. So the siren song of playing slo-pitch got even sweeter when the Geezers took it on the chin from a bunch of squirt students who pounded home runs like pop flies. 

Two reasons made my playing ball impossible. The first was, I can’t because I’m scheduled—a book club. The second was vastly more salient: I’m old. I don’t like to think about what might happen to this body of mine should I throw hard, swing hard, or even run—or try to--for that matter. This mortal coil had done nothing close to any of the above for more than a decade. Who knows what horrors I would suffer? 

No matter—if I wouldn’t have been at the book club, I would have been at the ball diamond. I would have. I swear. At least, I think I would have.

A friend of mine remembers the day his father, 70+, looked at him sardonically when this friend complained of some minor muscle ache. “Get used to it,” he said, with far more authority than sympathy. 

I'm there.

Most mornings when I wake, I walk downstairs slowly, the railing in my left hand, my right braced up against the wall, my back crooked, knees bent. My silhouette against the dim kitchen lights must resemble Notre Dame’s most famous hunchback. And it ain’t getting better. 

I wash small loads of wash lately because once a week at least a perfectly good shirt, a perfectly clean shirt, jumps off my chest to catch milk from the cereal bowl or syrup from pancakes. I get so angry, I wash them right away to destroy evidence.

But this friend of mine—the man who was warned by his father to get used to his aches and pains—right now is dying of lung cancer. He says in a note that his aches are different because now, he says, “I will never again be able to draw a full two-lungs'-worth of breath. I will ever puff at a flight of stairs. This body will nevermore be what it has been, nor can I frame my knowing it according to its ability to repair itself.”

And, he says, he’ll never get better. He’s busy “devising methods for living the diminishing life.”  And he still says, “Praise the Lord.”  He still says, “Hallelujah.” Just doesn’t have as much lung to profer that praise.

I'd like to think I could hit a ball out of the park, but I was a whole lot safer at a book club. 

Today is Easter. Yesterday, I burned up the big patch of prairie grass in our behind our house. What's out there now is scorched earth, a war zone. I burned it up, all of it, with the sure knowledge that what's there will rise again with new life, more green, more bountiful.

This morning we rise in the sure knowledge of faith that Geezers in spotless t-shirts who call upon His name will someday swat big fat pitches out of the park.

He is risen. Hallelujah!