I still have a couple of posts that I would like to make from the Mississippi-Tennessee area, but they take thinking and description, and I am a little blank right now. I just celebrated another birthday. Three score and ten ormore is one more today than it was yesterday. I didn't have a big restaurant celebration as Saurkraut did for her fortieth and her father's seventy somethingth, I just got up this morning and went to church where, as I am wont to do, I listened to about two thirds of two very good sermons and dozed through a little of each of them. I can out doze just about anyone, doing just about anything. In our class we discussed the seventeenth through nineteen chapters of First Kings which involve the knotty relationship between Elijah and King Ahab of Samaria as well as the widow lady who provided Elijah and her family (and possibly friends) with food, taken from one handful of meal in a bag and a small bit of oil, but who never figured out why it worked until tragedy overtook her. We also discussed Jezebel, the namesake of all women who steer men astray.

It was both an entertaining and informative discussion even though none of it was exactly new to me.

While we were at church my son had a pot-roast cooking, so when we got home we had a nice potroast dinner followed by some Blue Bunny ice cream (I love the "Banana Split", and the "Bunny Tracks" and most of the remainder of the day was spent reading, conversing, watching a little TV, and thinking. I am not sure why, for a coot, the thought that there may not be another birthday seems to bring about meditation, when it is as true for all of us that there may not be another birthday. One out of one of us will die, and no one of us really knows where we will be, or if there will be another tomorrow, but, right after one takes a full handful of pills, rubs down with muscle rubs it all seems a bit more real.

I married the most wonderful woman I ever knew. I wish she knew and believed that as well as I do, but we all look at ourselves either more critically than we should, or less critically than we should. But in my meditation today, I have thought about some of the things I have taught others and decided that some of them were not entirely accurate. In dealing with some of the problems in communication I have always tried to teach that no one can make YOU happy. Happiness is ultimately your, or my decision and that if one is happy, it is because one has made the decision to react to life's stimuli in a way that creates happiness and joy. ( I still think that this has a great deal of truth). I see the flaw in this only when I realize that my dear wife Janet has truly made me happier than my own nature would have allowed, and for that I will be eternally grateful (or at least grateful as long as I last).

Happy birthday to me.
Thank you Janet for everything, I wish I could make you understand how grateful I am.