TO AGE, AND YET TO DREAM

When I first started this blog, I expressed the desire to explain what happens when one gets to be “three score and ten-or more years old”  The way this blog has been posted for the past year is, unfortunately a fair example of what happens as one gets older. 

I think I was seventy two years old when I started.  I am now creeping up on seventy eight years old..  I am amazed at what has happened to me (well, not really happened to, but evolved within) in that  period.  When this began, it was great fun, and some days, I could hardly wait to get to the computer to write about my political opinions,  deal with the days events, or post things that I had already written (including one story that I had sold to a magazine, and though they paid me for it, they had never published it)  I had already begun a memoir which I called “WHAT i CAN REMEMBER AND WHAT i CAN FIGURE OUT” and the blog gave me an opportunity to put things out for my family and friends to read that I thought they would never seen if it stayed bound in a file folder in a file cabinet that probably would be emptied into the round file when I finally pass along. 

Now, I fill up during the day with stories I want to tell or experiences that I want to share, and when I sit at the computer, my mind is a blank slate.  I end up playing solitaire, and reading Facebook, even making occasional comments.

I started a second- half story of my son Eric, following up the first story that I posted right after his death, but it is so much harder to write stuff that is dependent on what he told me, what his teacher told me, the experiences in which interacted with my students.   Now, thinking has become a chore.  I am amazed at how much television I watch.  (Not having a really good memory is occasionally an asset, when one watches the seven thousandth episode of NCIS, it makes more sense if you can’t really remember what happened the first three times you saw the show) I would spend a lot more time reading my favorite blogs but so many of the writers of my favorite blogs have suspended action (and most of them aren’t even creeping up on seventy seven years old)  I do appreciated the blog written  by one of my father’s sisters.  She posts at least once a week and she’s almost ten years older than I.

There are so many things I would like to expound on:  As early as four years ago, I expressed the feeling that I would like to see some kind of revision in the health system in our country.  I think Obama-care is a disaster waiting to happen and cannot favor that.  It is clear that a lot of it  absolutely terrible, and nothing that is voted on by a congress who hasn’t had time or effort to even know what it is voting on, has a chance to be anything but a scam.  On the other hand, The CO-PAYMENTS  on my prescriptions are about two hundred bucks a month.  If I didn’t have a good retirement and insurance, the prescriptions would cost thousands, and I would just have to give up on that.  While we were in Finland for Jan’s surgery a few years ago, I bought almost exactly the same medicine in the “non-socialized” pharmacies in that country for less than I now pay in co-payments,  Down deep in my heart I am afraid that, if he had had insurance, I would bet that  some kind of treatment for Eric’s lung cancer would have been available that might have kept him with us for a few years.

Another unrelated issue, I really honor the work of the “Wounded Warrior Project”, but it infuriates me that it is necessary, that

the country doesn’t provide enough help to wounded soldiers who were wounded in their country’s service.  As fiscally conservative as I am, there are some debts that our country mush pay out of the treasury. 

Back to getting old:  I am astonished at the difference in both my mind and body between the time I started writing this, and now.  No matter how I try, I can’t pick up a thirty pound sack of almost anything and move it.  I can’t do any kind of labor above my eye level without danger of falling.  Since I started acupuncture, I and walk across the back yard with out a cane or without great pain, but I can’t stand in line for tickets or at the post office without being ready for a pain killer en just a few moments

I worked all day in the garden Thursday, and successfully planted four strawberry plants, four tomato plants a a Mandeville.   My garden is an eight foot by eight foot raised bed, and at the rate I am going I should have it all planted by the fourth of July..  I will try to post more frequently and to whine less about it, but I make no promises .