Nah, not because i’m old today. There’s a certain joy in getting past three quarters of a century. Of course, being old, i’m not too sure what that joy is.

Thus far, it has been wonderful. Maureen and Sarah took me to Bleu Boheme last night, one of our favorite French restaurants. We sat at the bar as we prefer. i perused the menu and went right back to Moules Frites au Saffron (mussels and fries) as i usually do. Being old, i refrained from my Bombay Sapphire Martini up with an olive as i have ordered in the past. After all, i’m old. Don’t feel it. But there are enough aches, pains, and doctor checkups to make me admit it. Maureen and Sarah were wonderful. i did miss Blythe and Jason and Sam but there’s a distance problem you see for someone who landed in the Southwest corner. Still is was as good as it could be.

Bleu Boheme even gave me a card with their entrance on the front page:

And my view from my seat at the bar was pretty cool:

It is a comfortable spot and except for my inability to pronounce French correctly (at least that is what my fluent wife tells me), they make you feel at home.

And i really like what they do with their candles.

But the thrill of it was being with these two:

And then we came home. Sarah gave me her gift. She knows me well. That pier, that Pacific Tugboat place is one of my favorite places to go.. The harbor smells, the old creosote wood pier (one, if not the only one still operating on San Diego Bay) takes me back to a wonderful existence i had for twenty-two years.

Let the big day begin. i’ll be working. Home projects. Like this being old.

The tough part is i made a promise to reply to each birthday greeting from everyone. Thus far, i have done that, but it’s getting tougher. i’ll keep at it, but thank all of you for your well wishes…just in case.

After supper tonight, my wife and daughter expelled me from the family room because i am not real fond of movies of this age and i landed in the “living room.”

This is akin to B’rer Rabbit being thrown into the briar patch by B’rer Fox and B’rer Bear.

i lit a fire, sat in the sitting chair (a good thing) next to the fire i just lit in the hearth, put my ear buds in, turned my iTunes on my music to listen to J.J. Cale, Mose Allison, Jimmy Smith, and Dvorak if i can stay awake that long.

i am in heaven. The world is good.

Yesterday, i began a series of posts about how i think about things with the intention of continuing along that line. But before i closed the books on last night, i went to a book i referenced to John Moriarty, a good man and one hell of an expert on whiskey which is intrinsically related to John being a wonderful Irish man. John had commented on a photo i posted of my aunt and infant me in a black and white photograph. i recommended to John a photographic book i acquired back in the late ’60’s because i was a devoted William Faulkner reader.

Before coming to what i should post next, i went back to that book, long after i should have gone to bed last night, because after all i had to get up before most humans to get to my tee time for golf in the rain. In the late night after everyone had gone to bed, i went through the book with incredible photo of the good and bad of how life was in my South.

Martin J. Dain’s Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County captures that good and bad of times past. The photos are pure art. Dain took quotes from Faulkner to consider on most of the pages.

As i read late into the night, i recognized something in me i had forgotten. i even wrote a poem (sort of) about my recognition of where many of my beliefs are based. But i had forgot until i read Willy’s quotes accompanying the photos.

Well folks, here are many of them, which are oh so wonderfully better than anything i could express:

What i perceived the Wilson County Courthouse to be on the Lebanon square before they tore in down and turned it into a parking lot and ruined the aura and history of the square:

…a Square, the courthouse in its grove the center, quadrangular around it, the stores… school and church and tavern and bank and jail in its ordered place… 

But above all, the courthouse: the center, the focus, the hub; sitting looming in the center of the county’s circumference like a single cloud…musing, brooding, symbolic and ponderable, tall as a cloud, solid as a rock, dominating all: protector of the weak, judiciate and curb of the passions and lusts, repository and guardian of the aspirations and hopes..

and

That was the danger, what a man had to watch against: once you laid flat on the ground, right away the earth started to draw you back down into it.

and

Father…said time is dead as long as it is being ticked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.

and

…I’d have wasted a lot of time and trouble before I learned that the best way to take all people, black or white, is to take them for what they think they are, then leave them alone. (i have great reservations about the rest of this quote because of the sensitivity of what we now perceive as politically correct, but folks, this is in my mind, is in no way a negative comment on race, but a confirmation of how we are all human; and i don’t think of the word as being confined to folks with a skin tone darker than mine; i think of it as a lazy abomination of the correct pronunciation and the word itself being applicable to people of all skin tones; and i am sad so many people regard the word as terrible when it is the thought, the meaning of the person invoking the word that should be despised or accepted based on the intended meaning of the word; no, not the word; and i am a minority in this sense; but i won’t use the word because folks will immediately and wrongfully label this boy from the South as a racist, which i am not but have had this kind of prejudice used against me more than once; and i am old, so deal with it) That is when i realized that a nigger is not a person so much as a form of behavior; a sort of reflection of the white people he lives among.

and

Man ain’t really evil, he jest aint got no sense.

and

Only a few of us know that only from homogeneity comes anything of a people or for a people do durable and lasting value — the literature, the art, the science, the minimum of government and police which is the meaning of freedom and liberty, and perhaps the most valuable of all a national character worth anything in a crisis — that crisis we shall face someday when we meet an enemy with as many men as we have and as much material as we have and — who knows? — who can even brag and boast as we brag and boast.

and

Years ago, we in the South made our women into ladies, Then the War came and made the ladies into ghosts. So what else can we do, being gentlemen, but listen to them being ghosts?

and

I think man tries to be better than he thinks he will be. I think that is immortality, that he wants to be better, he wants to be braver, he wants to be more honest than he thinks he will be and sometimes he’s not, but suddenly to his own astonishment he is.

and

Yes, the thought, between grief and nothing, i will take grief.

and, the last for tonight as i am into Dvorak now, but more later:

It is not man in the mass who can will save Man. It is Man himself, created in the image of God so that he shall have the power and the will to choose right from wrong and so be able to save himself because he is worth saving.

Thank you, Mister Faulkner.

it is the latter part of the evening and ai am too old and too cite the sources of Faulkner’s quotes. They are listed Dain’s book. 

But tonight, Anton and i are going to spend my last waking moments  together.

Have a good night.

In two days, i will hit number seventy-six. That is one more than three-quarters of a century. i plan to give up any political or religious posts, a plan to which i am likely not to adhere. i will have lots more to write, but my plan is for the writing to be from my experience with the hope someone might profit from my tales, either for learning what to do or what not to do when they are confronted with a similar situation.

So i am going to try and attempt some thoughts i have about life that do include some of my thoughts about religion and politics…and a couple of other things involved in living.

Bear with me. i am now certifiably an old man. 

The Age of My Innocence Lost

All of the requests i receive, primarily on Facebook, for prayers for someone’s family member or loved one ailing obviously are heartfelt, people reaching out for support in a time of anguish and need. i usually reply with some short comment, also heartfelt, with a response like “My thoughts and prayers are with you.” If i there is a personal connection, i usually add something to show i am connected, and my “thoughts and prayers” are real. i hope it gives the sender and their ailing family or friend some succor.

Such requests bring up several thoughts in my mind.

One is to wonder just how heartfelt those other responses are. Is it a quick dash of a reply, almost automatic? Am i being cynical? Perhaps. That is for each responder to decide.

If they have responded in earnest. Then, i believe they are following the guidance my brother, Joe Jewell, described in his book The Elements of Prayer: Learning to Pray in Real Life. If you have not read Joe’s book, you should. It strikes at the heart of our reason to pray and how to do it in a meaningful way.

i also thought about a moment in my youth around nine or ten. i was in our living room, the center of our activity until Mother and Daddy added on the den, breakfast room, and their upstairs bedroom (then the den and breakfast room became the normal place for us to spend our time). But that Sunday afternoon, i was alone in the living room with the small black and white television in one corner. i had been ill, probably bronchitis, the curse of my youth, and i was miserable. Oral Roberts came on the television. i’m not sure why i kept the television on, but it was probably because there was only one channel and television was a novelty at that time in our world.

Oral gave his sermon, to which i did not even listen. Then he started calling down the ill and the afflicted and put his hands on them and prayed furiously, invoking the crowd to pray with him. And miracles of miracles with a great deal of shaking and convulsions, the afflicted were healed; the blind could see; the crippled could walk; the deaf could hear. After this miraculous display, Oral turned to the camera and invited the listening TV audience who were afflicted to be healed. He instructed us to touch the television screen and pray with him for the healing powers to possess our souls or some such entreaty. A bit skeptical, even if it is difficult to imagine a nine or ten-year old to be skeptical, i approached the small screen and placed my hand on it and prayed, or thought i was praying, along with Oral Roberts incantations.

Didn’t work.

i was still sick.

I didn’t lose my faith, but i pretty much gave up on Oral Roberts and those like him.

I have other doses of reality change my views on religion, and although i have criticized formal religion for many sins i think i see, i have always retained my faith.

It is my faith, customized, not likely duplicated; but my faith does not disparage those who practice their religions in a more formal manner, even the atheists, who claim their belief is the only right answer. No, sometimes i even envy those who “know” what is right for everyone. i have even more respect for those who believe, have faith in their spiritual being…as long as either the knowing or the believing does not tread upon the beliefs of others.

And i pray. And when i pray, i try to follow Joe’s guidelines. And i pray in earnest, and when i respond to requests for prayers, those responses are heartfelt, earnest, and sincere.

And i believe.

Yesterday morning, the newspaper was tossed into the driveway by the nice old delivery man out of his late model car.

For a change, there was no plastic bag. Holding the paper together was a rubber band. The plastic is used in the Southwest corner to keep the paper dry from morning dew and ocean mist mostly. Sometimes it is used to keep out the rain and double bagged. But it’s been dry a couple of days. i guess they decided to save some plastic — a rare nod to conservation — this morning.

It reminded me of a long time ago in a land far away. For a brief time, about six months as i recall, i was a paperboy back home. Some boys made some pretty good money plying that trade through high school. As with nearly all things, other things, usually sports or girls distracted me, and i moved on from any real money making deal.

But for six months, i would rise early, probably around 4:30 and ride my bike east across the square and up East Main to a shack, literally, on the east side with no glass in the windows and a bunch of tables in the one or two rooms. The truck from Nashville would arrive, dump its load of The Tennessean’s off and return to Nashville for its afternoon run with The Banner.

The paperboys would get the allotted shares of the paper for their routes, stand at the tables and fold the newspapers into triangles, tucking one side into the fold to hold it together . We would put the papers in a canvas bag and most of us would put the bag in our bicycle baskets hanging in front of the handlebars.

A couple of the newsboys had mopeds or the equivalent. i think they had larger routes but no longer recall for sure. Regardless, they always finished early. For the non-motorized variety, and we were the large majority, we would pedal away to our routes.

My route was North Tarver, perhaps Braden and North Tarver, including West Main and Hill Street in between. i would pedal as fast as i could on my Schwinn, reach into the bag in the basket, grab a triangle by the corner and spin it in the air with the goal of making it to the porch, the front steps, or the sidewalk immediately below the steps. That was a success to me, and i would pedal on. More frequently than i care to admit, my twirling deliverable would land in bushes or yard. i would stop, retrieve it and put it in its proper place.

There were some old coots who demanded their papers were in front of the door on the porch. This required stopping and hurrying up to the porch, depositing the news in front of the door before continuing the route. This and the missed targets were time consuming and frustrating.

Now i’m an old coot, but i’ll never ask the paper man to get out of his car and put the newspaper at my door.

Yep, Nice old man. Late model car, not a moped or a bike. His route is probably gigantic, not two or three blocks. And it’s probably his job to supplement his social security so he can get by. And he not only gets tips at Christmas time; he asks for them with an envelope enclosed.

It made me a little lonely to think paperboys are no longer around, at least not here in the Southwest corner. So i decided to play paperboy, if only just for a moment.

i did this with bridge watches once quite a while ago. It was in the middle of the night when i was going through a divorce. i wanted to get away, go to sea. So i got up and grabbed two bricks and tied them to a cord (someone else told a joke about this and i thought it might make my effort feel more real). i made some coffee. i moved a bit of furniture so i could stand right at the front window. Then i put a cup of coffee on the window ledge, put the bricks around my neck as if they were a set of binoculars, called the sheep dog. Then old Snooker sat and i stood at the window for about fifteen minutes gazing out into the dark as if we were looking for contacts. i really did this.

It didn’t work, of course, but it did make me tired enough to get some sleep. i have never tried it again.

But yesterday morning, i wanted to be a paperboy again. i took the paper into the breakfast room. i removed the rubber band. Then, i tried to fold it into that triangle. Couldn’t do it. i tried every angle. Just couldn’t remember. Being this day and age, i did a google search. All i got was some kind of origami instructions.

This morning, the old man delivered the newspaper in the usual plastic bag. i didn’t try to figure out the triangle fold this morning. But i will. Yes, i will.

Some folks think i’m crazy.

The old paper man probably thinks so, too.

i think they are half-right.

Today was a good day.

Sarah and i actually got all of the big decorations put away. This is not a small task in the fake Christmas tree weighs a ton in its box and it is stored in the garage attic.

i took care of a lot of things i usually pass over for a lot more important things to do…i think.

Tonight, Maureen went to a memorial service for a friend who worked with her at Parron Hall. After a simple dinner, Sarah left for an evening with her friends.

i poured a glass of wine, started a fire in the hearth, put my old iPod with my music on “shuffle” and sat down to read. Jimmy Reed, Duke Ellington, Harry Connick, Jimmy Smith, Jessie Colin Young, Rachmaninov, Sonny Boy Williamson, Muddy Waters, The Ink Spots, Bob Seger, Paul Desmond, Nina Simone, Flatt and Scruggs, Johnny Cash, and Roy Rogers, among others, entertained me.

Seems about right…except i didn’t read. i played some games on my laptop, just listened to the music, and didn’t think. i just didn’t think.

And then i thought about a nice part of the day. Elmer is the basset hound who lives next door. Elmer has perplexed Regina, our neighbor since he arrived. He is capable of escaping the back yard in spite of Regina’s best efforts. So, of course, Elmer has become the darling of the neighborhood. When their grandchildren are visiting, grandparents take those grandkids out with the hope of seeing Elmer and giggling with delight.

Elmer and i have become good friends. Since i am next door, he visits often on his escapades. i take him back, open the gate to his backyard. His buddy, the old, black Labrador, and the two outdoor cats greet him like a long lost friend.

This has become a routine. When i hear Elmer bark and it sounds as if Houdini has made it out again, i go out front. When Elmer sees me, regardless of where he is, including in the middle of the street, he lays down and waits for me to come up to him. When i reach down to him, i rub those wonderful gigantic ears, and then Elmer rolls over for me to scratch his stomach. Once the ritual has been completed, i walk toward the gate while Elmer barks, rubs against me until i open the gate and he bounds inside without a care.

Elmer may be a bit goofy, but he often makes my day by reminding me of what is really important.