I’m still at the retreat center, for blog purposes.
Last Friday, the retreat meister said, “I’m looking out at you, and I’m seeing guys who are playing in the fourth quarter, or you’re batting in the bottom of the eighth, and this could be your last chance to smack one out of the park.” Of the seventy of us retreatants, 70% are 70+ or 70-. See how hard some people work to avoid using the “A” word?
            Then he said, “So, most of you, and me—the retreat meister is 72—are old. And do you know what God wants for us old fogies?
            “He wants for us to be happy old foggies.”
            Happy? How about if we go back to the garden and to the apple they ate, which they shouldn’t have. Do we have the scene on Heaven’s desk top? It’s there? Good. Punch delete. Eating the apple did not happen. See? Happy ever after, right?
            It doesn’t work that way.
            Oh. It doesn’t work that way. While I was arguing with God, the retreat meister was queuing up his next argument.
            “You are at a four way stop light. The light is red in your direction. In the other direction, the light is green for one hundred eleven cars. When it goes green in your direction, it is green just long enough for six cars to get through. You are car six.
            “The light turns green. Nothing happens. One horn honks. A second honks. Then five horns are really angry. Car #1 blasts through the intersection as if JATO bottles were attached and firing. Cars #2 thru #4 roar thru the intersection on green. #5 goes thru on yellow. You coast to a stop at the line and the red light grins down at you.
            “The question is,” Father said, “At that moment, do you want to be God? Jean Paul Sartre wrote something to the effect that man is the only animal who wants to be God. So, I ask again, Retreatants, looking at that red light, knowing the other five got through, and that you should have also, but you didn’t, do you want to be God?”
            This is a heavy question. There’s only one place I can go to get an answer. There’s this viewing spot overlooking the Mississippi and set on the edge of a cliff dropping away, well, let’s just say a fer piece down to the river bank. There are two deck chairs on this rock paved viewing area. After Father’s talk dribbled off, I was worried I might not get to there first, but I did.
            I sat in one chair and put my feet in the other to discourage company. “Self,” I said,
“do you want to be God?”
            I sat a while and contemplated, while down below, that ole man reeber, he didn’t say nothin’. I thought about all the stuff I thought God might do in a day, and I concluded pretty quickly I did not want to be Him. I’m retired. Being God seemed like an awful lot of work. But then I thought about sitting at that stop light seething with justifiable anger, and I decided I would like to be Darth Vader.
            I pictured it. The light was red in my direction too long. First, I’d close my eyes and clench my teeth and levitate the five cars in front of me out the heck of my way. Stack them in a parking lot to my left on top of each other probably. Then I’d raise my hands and tendrils of blue lightning would shoot out of my fingers and thumbs and fry the stop light.
            Then the drivers in the cars facing the intersection would think: The stoplight got fried. I will stomp on it and go through first.
            But Darth engages the Jedi mind control ap. He’d transmit: No. I will let Darth go through first.
            And they’d all think: No. I will let Darth go through first.
            And I could see me drive my TIE fighter on wheels through the intersection at a leisurely pace, and then I’d give the other drivers at the four-way their minds back.
            Oh, yeah! I could be Darth.
            Which, on second thought, probably means a trip to the confessional is in order.
        Way down below, Old Man River didn’t say anything, but he did nod his head up and down. Pretty vigorously for a guy who has aged a lot more than I have.

​Aging 4
Note: The photo is not of the eclipse but of the moon a couple of days before the cosmic event.
 
I like sunrises at the retreat center. These days, the sun rises after 0600. Friday, I got outside at 0500 and found just a sliver of moon and the morning star and not a hint of sunrise. The day before the sliver of moon was above the morning star. I thought that was interesting. The morning star sticks to its spot there above Illinois. Mr. Moon, he’s all over the place. I was thinking about Mr. Moon being free to roam around like he does and about Mr. Morning Star being stuck in one place. I wondered which one was the most serene.
            Then I thought my own serenity would be improved considerably if the serving wenches put coffee out at 0500 rather than 0530, by which time, Pilgrims, we’ve burned a lot of daylight, which is true even though there isn’t any. Something down the slope moved. One, no two, wispy, whitish-in a gray sort of way-shapes. Ghosts! I think. Ghosts of serving women past come to capture my soul and drag it down to hell for calling them wenches, like I was some kind of lord or something. You ghosts ain’t getting’ me without a fight! I thought that at them with my teeth clenched in determination. Then I cocked my head a bit. At night, the center of eyeballs don’t see as well as the periphery. I learned that when I was in flight training. Anyway, then I see it is not ghosts. It’s two small white tails.
Some scholars think Neanderthals had the ability to transfer thoughts. And that’s how they got sloped foreheads. One Neanderthal would transfer a thought to another, and the second one would think, Now why didn’t I think of that? And he’d smack himself on the forehead. Anyway, those two deer transferred thoughts into my vestigial Neanderthal thought transference capability. One said, “What the crap are you doing up so early?” The other said, “Everybody knows they don’t have the coffee out until 0530.” Then those two teen-aged deer swished their saucy, sassy white tails at me and sauntered off into the brush. I sent I bet you guys would taste good as Bambi-burghers, after them. They weren’t impressed.
I heard a noise behind me. A woman was putting the coffee into the dispensing machine. 0525. Early. Thank you.
They serve wimpy coffee, but it’s coffee and it smells heavenly. With a sip, I saw that woman as a little bit of Jesus with a towel wrapped around His waist at Holy Thursday dinner and He’s washing the apostle’s feet. Even Judas’s.
Friday, it turned out, was a good day at the retreat, but the evening was best. In the evening, after blessed kitchen crew serves us dinner, retreatants can spend an hour conversating if they want to. Me, normally I don’t. Normally I get the crap out of there before anyone talks to me or loads me down with Neanderthal transference of thoughts. But Friday night, one of the guys from my parish captured me. Oh poop! was my thought.
What he wanted to tell me was his wife had noticed me walking into and out of church, and she thought I was in a lot of pain. Mrs. His Wife has been praying for me. Oh poop!
I don’t know if this happens to you, but this is what happens to me. I am trucking through life. Sometimes life sucks a little, sometimes a lot. But you know, you’re coping, getting along. Then, Blamo! Something extraordinarily nice ambushes you. It’s like a hand reaches in to my chest and squeezes my heart, and some of my heart winds up in my throat and its big as a grapefruit and hard as a green one. Next thing, unless I do something, I will be leaking water out of my eyes and snot out of my nose. I started talking and explained about long leg and short leg and muscles screwed up by standing on the side of a mountain. Then I told him to tell Mrs. His Wife I really wasn’t in a lot of pain. Most of the time. And even if I was, I am mild-mannered and of even disposition, and it wouldn’t affect me. But to tell her that I was touched by her concern and to thank her for the prayers.
Then I got the crap away from him and went to my room and blew my nose, numerous times.
I knew if I asked Mrs. His Wife, she’d go in to church and genuflect once for herself and once for me, and I might still make it to heaven with her help.
Then God spoke to me at my little desk in my little room in the retreat house. “My son, the least of your worries is genuflecting properly.”
“Oh,” I said.
I will confess, the last thought meandering in my brain that night before I fell off the world and into sleep was: If people keep doing good stuff for me, and I accept it, am I going to lose my “Member in good status” card with the curmudgeonly old poop society?
They haven’t come to take it away yet.

​Aging 3
Did it ever occur to you, that for many of us, the closer we get to dying, the harder it is to genuflect? Is that fair? Seems like it could have been worked out. Let the rest of the body go to hell but keep that ability to genuflect, right up to the end.
            Last Thursday I went on a retreat. The Jesuits have this retreat house south of St. Louis. It sits on a cliff high above the Mississippi. I’ve gone there maybe half a dozen times. The sunrises are something special. The best thing about the retreats, though, is the retreatants can’t talk to each other. So, I don’t mind driving an hour to be with seventy guys I can’t talk to.
            Jesuits go to more school than most other orders. That should make them smart. I thought maybe I could talk to one about genuflecting in the one-on-one sessions they have where you can talk.
            Anyway, I arrived at the retreat house Thursday evening. The priest conducting the retreat gives ten presentations. He can talk because he’s a priest. Anyway, he says the retreat is going be centered on “The Serenity Prayer.” I thought okay. What I was looking for was some serenity about how hard it had gotten for me to genuflect, and since I was aging, I was concerned. I mean, you can only carry this aging thing so far.
            Maybe I should explain my problem. My right leg is shorter than the other one on the port side. How much shorter? Well, I took a copy of “The Happy Life of Preston Katt,” put it on the floor, and stood with my right foot on it. A novella was not going to cut it. The thickest book I wrote was “The Ensign Locker.” I stood on it. Still not enough. “The New American Bible” is some half an inch thicker still, so I stood on it. Voila! I was a flatlander. I briefly considered going to the retreat with the Bible duct-taped to my foot, but as soon as I had the thought, I had a vision of a scene from the movie “The Mission.” In the scene, South American Indians take a missionary priest and crucify him and then throw the crucifix, with him on it, into a river. The Jesuits have a river. They have big crucifixes. I decided walking on the Bible might not be a good idea. They may have seen that movie.
            So, anyway, back to my legs, what’s happened as I’ve aged, my flatlander muscles have gotten screwed up some by me, in effect, standing on the side of a mountain. I can walk. I don’t know what I look like, but it doesn’t hurt. I can chop a stump out of the ground. Probably not as big as the one Shane and Joe Start dug up, but a sort of big one. I can climb a ladder. Actually, I can’t because the Boss of Everything says, “Nuh-uh.” The other thing I can’t do is genuflect properly.
            So, anyway, back to the retreat. I go into the first presentation Thursday night, and the priest says all ten of his talks are going to be based on The Serenity Prayer. That’s the one that starts with asking for the serenity to accept the things you cannot change. Half way through the prayer, there’s this line: “Accepting hardship as the pathway to peace.”
            That’s it! It’s the same as saying: “Suck it up;” “Get over it;” “Don’t be such a sissy;” “It’s not bleeding much. Rub some dirt on it and get back in there.”
            I didn’t hear much of what father said after that line of the prayer. I wasn’t sure what it meant. Was I supposed to genuflect even if it took me seven minutes to complete the maneuver?
            I walked out of Thursday’s presentation with less serenity than I walked in with.
            But, come back tomorrow so I can tell you what happened on Friday. 

​My birthday dessert, peach pie with a Dove bar stuck in it, was so downright tasty, I decided to try a brownie with a Dove bar. I received a brownie mix as a birthday present. The recipe was simple enough for a man to follow, even though he’s never before cooked a brownie in 7.6 decades on earth. The recipe even explained how to use a toothpick to see if it is cooked good enough to take out of the oven. I remembered seeing the Squeeze doing that trick when she cooks something in the oven. She calls it bakin’ when she cooks something in the oven.
Anyway, I tried my brownie with a Dove bar stuck in it. It was heavenly. There might be a universal truth in there. Even wonderful things to eat can be made more wonderful by sticking a Dove bar in it.
Anyway, as I ate, licking my lips and moaning, I thought about how good things taste after they’ve been cooked in an oven. Bakin’ that’s called. It occurred that the reason bakin’ products taste so good is because it sounds like bacon. Since, I was getting such good thinking going, I also wondered if maybe Dove bars might be brain stimulation food, like that kinky balboa stuff or whatever it’s called. I proposed the brain stimulation powers of Dove bars to the Squeeze.
She grabbed me by the arm and drug me to the bedroom, closed the door, by which time I had totally stopped thinking. But she parked me in profile in front of the full-length mirror. “There’s one thing Dove bars stimulate. Look,” she said. Well, my eyes, as I’ve mentioned before, have been trained for decades to be very selective in what they look at in mirrors. But, She, being the Boss of Everything, well, She said look, and the eyes looked.
Whoa. There was this … bulge I guess I’ll call it above where my belly button is. I didn’t know it was there. My pants size hasn’t changed. My waist has been thirty something since high school.
She recounted, quite forcefully, the history of my waist size.
“Wait. Are you saying I’ve gotten fat?” I asked her.
“If the shoe fits, dot, dot, dot,” she said.
“I haven’t gotten fat,” I replied confidently. “I’ve aged. Slightly. But gracefully.”
“We’re having leftovers for dinner,” she said.  
“The chicken and beef from my birthday dinner?”
“Yes. The cock and bull.”
That woman. She always manages to get the last word in.

Aging
This year has been weird. Weird weather for sure. We had spring in February. In March, after many blooming trees bloomed, we had a hard freeze. Down the hill behind our house, we have side-by-side redbud trees. One got its little buds froze off. The other didn’t. And, thank You, God, it didn’t kill this year’s crop of Calhoun County peaches. Then we had the dog days of August in July, and we are having September this month.
            So, the weather is making the year weird, right?
            It’s what I believed until yesterday. My seventy-sixth birthday happened then. It didn’t have to happen, but my beloved sister-in-law blew the Facebook whistle on me. Lo. Once it’s on FB, it’s real. Then my brother-in-law ordered up a parade, led by seventy-six trombones, to march around Edgemont Circle. And that’s when Number 76 clobbered me with the realization I am now closer to 80 than 70. Whoa! How could that be possible? I know some Landing Signal Officers who are in a state incredulity right now, especially the ones who graded my landings as, WLTBT, “Won’t live to be thirty.” But I did, and it’s true because it was on FB.
            Then it dawned on my engineering brain that I could not have gotten to be 76 without aging. Now, last year’s birthday happened without any aging having happened whatsoever. There was no evidence to support the hypothesis that aging had happened. Of course, I will say my eyeballs were carefully trained to see only shaving cream when they found it necessary to look in a mirror. Oh, and the nose hairs.
            This dealing with aging is suddenly traumatic. To help cope, for my birthday dinner, I asked for surf and turf. The Love of My Life, My One and Only Squeeze, and The Boss of Everything fixed chicken and beef. “That’s so much more appropriate for you,” she said sweetly.
​