Birthday stuff

Mom would say, were she here, that 73 years ago today when the doctor came in she was toting a bouncing baby boy--me, a kid so healthy, she claimed, she could drop me off outside of town in some field and I'd do just fine. I must not have had a weird ticker back then. I do today, but I'm not sorry--it kept me out of Vietnam in the worst of times, a blessing back then and even now. Like a couple of million others, I'd guess, I live with afib. 

Otherwise, a few years up from my biblically allotted three-score and ten, I'm in pretty good shape, better, I can't help but think, than my grandpa Dirkse, who was 65 when, one night, his heart stopped running. Grandpa Schaap was 77, which means I'm right there between them. I don't hangout in a cornfield--it'd be an awful place right now--but I've got no plans to die right now, although I grant you that in all likelihood few of us who have, do.

I'm a day away from my first Covid shot. Don't know if that insures anything, but I'll be more comfortable about things when that juice is working, not that I've been paranoid. 

Trump berated Mitch McConnell yesterday, proving he's still alive and kicking, so I've still got him to be get churned up about (not that I'm a fan of Moscow Mitch). 

Today? Well, it doesn't look like a prize-winner. We're not off to Tahiti. This morning I've got the dentist again (I'm a frequent flyer), and tonight there's Ash Wednesday worship to remind me and all of us that we're dust. Even a little redundant maybe. On almost any birthday after your 21st, hardly any of us need reminding, especially when the birthdays start stacking up like mine.

It's my birthday today--there, I've said it. I'm 73 years old. Last night I took what family I could out for buffet at the Pizza Ranch, closest I'll get to a party. Because it was my birthday, I got five bucks off. So there.

There was some talk--nothing firm--about the far-off possibility of a wedding. Didn't surprise me much since my granddaughter and her beau have been sweet for years already. Still, the possibility was daunting because a wedding means her creaky grandparents get escorted down the aisle of some area church by a young man taking my wife's arm. I know the routine. We'd then be placed like museum pieces in a front bench. It'll happen.

I'll always remember my the very first day of teaching--English literature to seniors at Blackhawk High School, South Wayne, Wisconsin--because it meant finding a way to talk about the Venerable Bede, a Benedictine monk I hadn't heard of myself, a man commonly thought of as the father of English history because he wrote that history out in a volume titled The Ecclesiastical History of the English People. 

I don't remember much more of the Venerable Bede than a single, well, meme. It's worth our time. 

O king, it seems to me that this present life of man on earth, in comparison to that time which is unknown to us, is as if you were sitting at table in the winter with your ealdormen and thegns, and a fire was kindled and the hall warmed, while it rained and snowed and stormed outside. A sparrow came in, and swiftly flew through the hall; it came in at one door, and went out at the other. Now during the time when he is inside, he is not touched by the winter's storms; but that is the twinkling of an eye and the briefest of moments, and at once he comes again from winter into winter. In such a way the life of man appears for a brief moment; what comes before, and what will follow after, we do not know. Therefore if this doctrine [Christianity] offers anything more certain or more fitting, it is right that we follow it.

He was, as you can tell, indeed venerable. The night before that class, my very first, I shook my head at what had become my fate. What on earth do high school seniors out here in rural Wisconsin have to do with that lousy sparrow? 

I was 22 years old, hadn't lived much. Today, on my 73rd birthday, me and the Venerable Bede could speak volumes. 

You're wondering about what's up there at the top of the page? A carrot cake my wife will frost this morning, a bag of wicked trail mix (a birthday present from my kids), and a cinnamon roll I just now pulled out of the freezer and will sinfully devour for breakfast. 

Then it's off to the dentist, and Ash Wednesday, and tomorrow my Covid shot.

Life is good, but it sure does move along, Mr. Venerable. It sure does, even at 73.