On Turning 65

When I was young, I worked in what we liked to call the “convenience store industry”. Alcohol, tobacco, sugar: those are the mainstays of that industry; those, and armed robberies. I still read stories of c-store crime and feel my stomach tense.

A year or two ago, a headline caught my eye: “ELDERLY MAN BEATEN IN CONVENIENCE STORE ROBBERY” it screamed. I began to read the story: “Houston, TX (AP): In a brutal attack last night at approximately 11 pm, Joe Blow, 62, was pistol-whipped and robbed while working at the Stop N…” I stopped reading. I looked at the headline again. Then I reread that first sentence, shocked not so much at the casual brutality of the crime but at the fact that the “elderly” victim was younger than I was!

Today I turned 65. I don’t feel elderly. No one has (yet) pistol-whipped me. So I thought, since I am now well-stricken in years, I should share some of the wisdom I have gained.

In preparation, I took out a sheet of paper on which to list all my collected pearls of wisdom and (to keep myself humble) all my acts of folly. At the top of the paper, I wrote “List of:”, then drew a line underneath that, then drew another line dividing the page into two columns. At the head of the left-hand column I wrote “Wisdom”. At the head of the right-hand column I wrote “Folly”.

I wrote a couple of things down on the Wisdom side of the page, then wrote the same two things down on the Folly side of the page. Filling out the Folly side was pretty easy, actually: the words flowed, and the list grew, and moved to the back of the paper, and, in fact, could have filled several more pages. The Wisdom side stayed blank except for those first two items. I decided that perhaps the world wasn’t quite ready for my wisdom and that I wasn’t quite ready to share my follies.

Maybe when I turn 75…

Waiting on the Tooth Fairy

Lillian spent a good part of December and early January on the road with her dad and mom, Josh and Amy. She visited with her Nana and Paw-Paw in Huntington, and with her Grandma Linda, Amy’s mom, away up in Michigan. Asked what she did in Michigan? “Played in the snow. A lot. Built a snowman in the woods with my mom.”

Yia-Yia and ePa picked her up today for a long (and, we hope, lazy) weekend. One of her front baby teeth came out at school today, and Lillian is sure that the tooth fairy will find her way to Lillian’s room at Yia-Yia’s house tonight. She plans to leave the tooth where it will be easy for the tooth fairy to find, since she believes that the tooth fairy will be unfamiliar with Yia-Yia’s house, and Lillian does not want to get in the habit of inconveniencing fairies.