Sunday Morning Meds--Hallelujah!*

“Praise the LORD, O my soul. 

Praise the LORD.” Psalm 104:34

Tomorrow night, I’m going to a book club, the members of which have now read the assigned novel, March by Geraldine Brooks. We’ll discuss, but my estimate of the book won’t changed—I liked it. Our discussion will hold few surprises.

The truth is, I’d rather be playing slo-pitch. A math prof, older than I am, decided the college faculty should have an intramural softball team. He’s calling them the Geezers. He organized it and now has them out on the field. They got thumped in their first game, so the coach sent out an e-mail lookin’ for beefier hitters. Singles just don’t make it in slo-pitch.

I used to slam homers methodically, routinely—every other at bat almost. Not a lie. So the siren call 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.

I can’t go play slo-pitch, however, and one reason is the book club. Another is that I’m just getting too old. I don’t like to think about what might happen to this body should I throw hard, swing hard, or even run, for that matter. This mortal coil has experienced nothing close to any of the above for more than a decade. Who knows what horrors I will inflict?

No matter—if I wouldn’t be at the book club, I’d be at the ball diamond. I would. I swear. I think.

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.

Most mornings when I wake, I walk downstairs slowly, the railing in my right hand, my left braced up against the wall, my back crooked, knees only half unfurled. 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, more often than I’d like to admit because once a week at least a perfectly clean shirt jumps off my chest to catch milk from the cereal bowl or syrup from pancakes. I get so angry that 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, he’s dying of lung cancer. And he says in a note he sent me 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.”

Now 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 power to propel the praise.

I like to think I could still hit a ball out of the park, but tomorrow night I’ll be a whole lot safer at a book club. I just hope that, like my diminished friend, when my time comes I can call upon an ever-youthful faith and say with the psalmist, at the very end of this museum-piece psalm, “Hallelujah, Praise the Lord.”

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*from Sixty at Sixty--and coming close to 20 years old.