Threescore and ten ... and then?

“The days of our life are threescore and ten, and even by reason of strength fourscore years; yet their span is but toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away.”

Psalm 90:10

Here I am at threescore and ten, or as we would phrase it today, the Big Seven-Oh. I can’t say that age has snuck up on me. I’ve seen it coming for years, decades even. I know my face and body have aged. I see it and feel it every day. My joints and muscles hurt most days, and some foods tend to tie my digestive tract in knots. My faltering memory embarrasses me nearly every day. I often can’t recall someone’s name, although I know it perfectly well; it just won’t show itself. It’s as if my brain were an overstuffed Rolodex, and some days the right card just won’t pop up.

Nevertheless, I’m grateful to be here at this biblical age. My threescore years and ten have been good, better than I deserve. I have experienced disappointments and tragedies, along with joys and pleasant surprises. Friends from long ago have preceded me to the grave years before they reached this epoch. I have stood by the graves of parents, siblings, cousins, and friends. The Psalm’s threescore and ten years is not a promise; not everyone will make it. Nor is it a delimiter. Some will live past 70. My parents made it to their late 80s, but their last decade was sad and painful.

Genes from my parents might get me through a few more years, but if those extra years involve the kind of dementia and residence in a nursing home that they experienced, I’d rather leave the stage now.

Yes, this span “is but toil and trouble,” and the years “are soon gone,” after which “we fly away.” We will soon get a reminder of our mortality on Ash Wednesday: “You are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Maybe not imminently, but certainly.

I’m hopeful for another decade or two past this milestone if my body and brain will continue working. I don’t want to end the romance that began nearly 50 years ago; we have other things to see, places to go, conversations to have and hugs to share. I want to see my grandchildren, no longer babies, grow into adulthood. I have lived to see “your children’s children” as the biblical blessing promised (Psalm 128:6). Now I want to see them grown and living their own successful lives.

For the most part, I have found that life keeps getting better. I rather dreaded my forties, which began with an “over the hill” party, because I was no longer a young man. My fifties were better. The children were mostly on their own, and our “empty nest” wasn’t at all bad once I got used to the quiet in the house. My sixties were difficult as loved ones died, and my career took an abrupt turn, but our marriage grew stronger as we faced that decade together.

Now I bid farewell to my sixties, no longer joking that “it’s the sixties all over again!” Most of all on this threescore and ten, I am grateful for a life different from the one I imagined at the one-score mark. This life, however long it may last, has been as wonderful as George Bailey’s life in Bedford Falls.

This post originally appeared in The Wilson Times March 2, 2019.

Christmas comes again this year

Can it be that Christmas is less than a week away? It has come quietly this year, without so much of the hurrying, the planning, the buying, the addressing of cards, the baking, the worrying, the wondering if we've done all that we should be doing.

Like other things, Christmas grows quieter, more nostalgic, more home-centered as we grow older. My wife and I have done the Christmas thing (or things) for more than 45 years. We've transitioned from the two of us to the five of us to the addition of grandchildren, around whom Christmas has been focused the past dozen years.

Christmases have come in three distinct phases: (1) Childhood Christmas, when excitement over new toys, bountiful candy and an air of cheerfulness permeated our reality; (2) Christmas with children, when our joy in seeing the happiness on our children's faces exceeded all of the excitement we had known as children; and (3) Christmas with grandchildren, when we see ourselves in our grown children's faces as they experience the sheer joy of making their own children ecstatically happy.

Now, we seem to be facing another phase, when we face Christmas as aging grandparents with grandchildren grown too big for excitement and too independent to cuddle with old folks. At our age, the excitement and joy of Christmas have been tempered by the sadness of losing relatives and friends who had been integral to our Christmas happiness. We have lost parents, siblings, cousins and dear friends, whose memory haunts our Christmas revelry. We even count the years in actuarial tables to see how many Christmases we might reasonably expect to have remaining.

This Christmas will be a quieter holiday at our house. We decided not to revive our once-annual tradition of a Christmas open house. Although we are retired and should have been able to plan the party, send the invitations and do the preparations needed to get dozens of people into our home with cheerful greetings of "Merry Christmas," but we couldn't seem to get it done, and now it's too late.

Still, we intend to make Christmas a festive time, as well as a sacred time. We will attend Christmas Eve services, and we will eat a special meal, even if it is only for the two of us. We will celebrate another Christmas, and it will be one, like all the preceding ones, like no other.

Merry Christmas.

 

Reading obits for high school classmates

Ronnie Horne is dead. The not entirely unexpected news came via an email from a fellow high school classmate. He was my age. These notices have been coming with increasing regularity. My 121-member high school class has been trimmed by about half. Ronnie, with whom I shared classrooms from 1955 to 1967, was just the latest.

The funeral is tomorrow at a church I've never seen and is about a four-hour drive away. Forgive me for missing this one. I've found it difficult to attend the funerals of any of my classmates. While many of them stuck close to the rural communities where we grew up and attended a countywide consolidated high school, I have been gone from those landmarks for some 50 years.

I've felt an obligation to attend some memorials — Punky Morton, my best friend in high school; Barry Dellinger, a very close friend in lower grades; but I mourned the others from a distance — a high school girlfriend; a kind girl with a last name, like mine, beginning with T, which placed us in neighboring desks in many high school classes; the class clown everyone loved for his optimism and friendliness, and all the others; a football teammate who heard our coach tell us we'd never forget our teammates (but we did).

Our 50th reunion was held 14 months ago. The teenagers of 1967 gathered in groups to hug and shake hands, to discuss jobs and retirements, to compare grandparenting experiences, to complain of ailments and limitations, to reminisce, and, mostly, to celebrate having made it this far in life.

We do not fool ourselves into thinking there is anything unique about our experiences. Fiftieth reunions are held every year. Someone's long-lost classmate passes away every day. Millions of people my age read the obituaries every day, silently judging who's my age and who has departed far too young.

The worst aspect of aging is the loss of friends, neighbors, siblings, parents, and others who had shaped our lives and who cannot be replaced. All we can do is remember. Rest in peace.

Generations shift at family reunions

Family reunions are more than periodic opportunities to reunite with relatives you seldom see or barely know. Family reunions are also lessons in the steady advance of time. These events reveal truths we are reluctant to recognize, that we age into new roles without acknowledgement or intention. We become not only our parents but also our grandparents and great-grandparents.

In the past two months, I've attended reunions of my mother's and my father's families. My mother's family, comprising six siblings, was especially close-knit, it seemed to a youthful me. The five sisters and one brother, with all their children (a total of 13 grandchildren for my grandparents) gathered every Sunday afternoon at the home my grandfather built on a small farm after he retired from the cotton mill. While the adults sat and talked, my cousins and I had free run of the farm with its fields, pond and barn. At this year's reunion, only eight of the 13 cousins were still living, and not all of them attended the reunion.

My father's family seemed less adhered. The ten siblings scattered farther away from the mill village where all were raised. Some sought better jobs or followed ambitions or circumstance to distant places. One son, the youngest, never returned from World War II, though his brothers survived.

Now, when families gather, the remnants of my father's family seem closer and more eager to reunite. When I look around at either reunion, I see my contemporaries, my first cousins, and their children and grandchildren and realize that I am now where my grandparents were in my youth — elderly, a little insecure, and overjoyed, filled with gratitude, to see the children of our children. The old pictures we pass around show our parents in middle age or later, and we take pictures of our generation, at that same vulnerable age, distinguished from our parents primarily by this year's color photography, which contrasts with the black-and-white light and shadows of the old pictures. The faces are not so different. We, who once tugged on the pants and skirts of parents, now look down at the toddlers who have assumed our earlier roles, impatiently tugging for attention.

We are constantly teetering on that instability of being the playful kid, the cocky teenager, the ambitious, confident young adult, while also being the elderly, time-limited, slower, fading people we saw our parents become. Can we possibly be the same person? We don't recognize the bell curve of life until we are plummeting on the downward side, unable to stop it or slow it down.

Why the years go by so fast

It's an accepted fact that as one grows older, the years go by faster and faster. Birthdays, holidays, anniversaries, seasons all come faster than they did a few decades ago, when it seemed Christmas would never arrive. Now, a new Christmas season comes before the detritus from the last one is cleared away. Birthdays click by before you can do the math on the last one.

My wife and I have discovered a complement to this accepted fact about years: as we grow older, there is less time to do the things we have to do, need to do and want to do. Keeping the house clean, keeping the yard mowed, keeping the garden weeded and pruned, keeping the laundry done, preparing meals, shopping for groceries — the time to do all these things gets more difficult to find as the years rapidly pass.

If the years are flying past, I suggested to her, then the hours of each day must also be speeding by like a meteor flashing across the night sky. Look aside and you miss it.

We are trapped in this vortex of continuously shortened years. These shortened years require shortened months, which require shortened weeks, which require shortened days, which require shortened hours, and, therefore, we cannot find the time in these perniciously shortened hours to do the things we need to do and want to do.

We cannot slow down the passing years, no matter how much we'd like to freeze time at moments with our children and grandchildren or with siblings, parents and friends. We can only accept the loss of time and the rapidly compressing windows of opportunity to go to the places we want to go, see the people we want to see, do the things we want to do. We can only live in the moment and accept the unmowed yard, the disheveled house, the unweeded garden. Concentrate instead on what is most important, what is most precious, what matters most, and reserve your shortened hours for those times. Time flies, so grasp it while you can.

How much longer can we do this?

    Ginny was halfway up the pull-down ladder to the attic, struggling with two large plastic bins I was handing up to her when I had a question for her: “How long are we going to be able to keep doing this?”
    By “doing this,” I meant hauling a dozen or so large plastic bins down from the attic and swapping out their contents for decorations throughout the house, an annual ritual that begins after Thanksgiving and ends after Epiphany each year. The movement of the bins from the attic to the living spaces and back again and then reversing the process eight weeks later takes a little time, some strength and good balance on those shaky steps with the narrow rungs. How long would we have the strength and balance to move several rooms full of decorations up and down those steps? How long could I lift a heavy plastic bin over my head and into the opening to the attic? How long could Ginny keep her balance going up and down those steps, pushing up or handing down those big, heavy bins?
    The question behind my question was this: How long can we continue to decorate for Christmas in the manner to which we’ve been accustomed? That to which we’ve become accustomed has been a total transformation of the house: pictures, pillows, photographs, linens, dinnerware, rugs and books are replaced by accessories with a Christmas theme. The transformation has continued through two homes, the early excitement of our children and now our grandchildren, through at least two dozen Christmas parties and well into our “senior” years.
    But my question, like the decorating itself, endures: How long can we keep doing this?
    An earlier holiday provides an answer. At a Thanksgiving gathering that included most of our children and grandchildren, plus others, everyone was asked what they were thankful for. My answer:
    I am thankful for more than 60 years of family gatherings as locations and characters changed over the years; for several hundred pounds of turkey, ham, dressing, veggies and pies and cakes consumed; for seeing me and my cousins in my children and grandchildren and their cousins; for the wisdom that comes with age and that youthful stupidity was not fatal. I am thankful that a woman I could never deserve chose to love me. I am thankful that my children grew to maturity, graduated, succeeded, married and are independent and loving parents themselves. I am thankful for life.
    On reflection, I would add one more bit of thankfulness: I am thankful for my wife’s parents who welcomed me, a near stranger, into their family, who never doubted my love for their daughter or questioned my ability to support her.
    For this Christmas season, we will haul the decorations from the attic and place them throughout the house, even though we can’t find the time for a Christmas party and cannot lure all the children and grandchildren to our home for a celebration, we can be thankful for lives so full of blessings and so defining of grace — unearned favor. With an attitude of gratitude, our Christmas will be full again this year and every year.

I'm giving up the manual transmission

For the first time in nearly 20 years, I am not driving a stick-shift transmission in my main ride. Over those 20 years, I drove a 1994 Honda Del Sol and a 2003 Honda Accord V6 Coupe. The Del Sol had a five-speed, and the Accord had a six-speed. I enjoyed the shifting of the gears and the greater sense of control the stick-shift gave me. It was also nice being a little different from most everyone else. Stick-shifts are in sharp decline in the United States. A friend who was in the car business in Tennessee for many years said when the started, the dealership's inventory was about 25% manual transmissions (Hondas and Volvos), but more recently (five years ago), the breakdown was under 5% manual. Being different, however, my family at one time had three vehicles with stick shifts — my Del Sol, my wife's Altima (Nissan was offering a phenomenal deal on leases with manual transmissions) and my son's old Subaru wagon. When I fell and broke my shoulder blade in 2003, leaving my right arm immobile, I had to switch cars with my wife (who by then had an automatic) so that I could reach with my left arm across my body to shift the car into "D" for about a month until I got the use of my right arm back.

But now I've succumbed to modernity and aging, and my new ride has an automatic transmission. It's not that I was tired of shifting gears. The decision was a rational one, recognizing my advancing age and the likelihood that if I keep my next car ten years or more (as I usually do), my left leg might not be nimble enough to operate a clutch. So my new car is an automatic, but it has a "clutchless automatic" option — you can switch from "D" to "M" and shift the gears without use of your left leg, at least up to a point. The automated manual does not allow you to shift into fourth gear until you've reached a certain speed, and your downshifts are also limited. Still, the option is there if ever I want to use it.

This, I've told myself, is my retirement car. It's the car I will drive in retirement, taking long-postponed trips to places on our bucket lists, so I opted for the top trim line with all the bells and whistles for comfort and entertainment. It's a car I hope will last me for 20 or 25 years. And I hope I'll last that long, too, and still be able to drive.

A time for purging books

The day has come at our house to purge the books. There are too many of them, more than we can read during our brief quiet evenings of reading time. There are books we'll never read, or will never re-read, having read them once and judged them not worth a second or third reading. There are books that once seemed important, but their importance has faded in the decades since they appeared on our shelves. There are books that fueled our interests in things like bicycling and running or supplemented our knowledge in matters such as child rearing, breastfeeding or home repairs.

We have books that seemed intriguing but weren't and books that seemed like such a bargain at the yard sale or library book sale but never rose to the top of the stack of books to read next. There are novels that were well-written and suspenseful and that we would recommend to other readers, but they weren't worth a second read and now no longer are worth the space they consume on the bookshelf.

Early in our marriage, I tried to convince my wife that we should not buy novels or other fiction because, well, libraries can supply you with all the novels you'll ever need in a lifetime. Nonfiction is different, I tried to tell her, because they deal in facts. They serve as reference material, a fact-checking resource when questions of science or history arise.

Despite the logic of my argument, we have managed to collect dozens, if not hundreds, of novels. We were lured into Book of the Month Club more than once and accumulated some books in that way. The new novels always sounded so compelling, so worth the read and the price of a book, especially when you found the book at a library book sale or yard sale. Now we are separating the novels that are worth keeping and reading again and again — novels like "Cold Mountain" or "To Kill a Mockingbird" or "A Farewell to Arms" — from the novels that once were fresh and new but now seem formulaic and ephemeral.

As for the nonfiction books that I once contended would always be useful resources, all of their facts can be found instantly in a Google search, neatly organized, usually with multiple references. Encyclopedia, which once got middle schoolers through their first research papers, are now as obsolete as slide rules. Resource books, from encyclopedia to World Almanacs to dictionaries are now conveniently accessible on the web.

We've decided to keep, at least for now, a few reference books — a few authoritative volumes on grammar and word usage, a print dictionary, and a copy of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations that her mother used in college and that bears her signature. I will keep a book given to my father when he was a boy, a do-it-yourself text for making toys and things from scraps.

We'll get rid of the couple of dozen journalism textbooks, newspaper memoirs and journalistic histories I had collected in three decades of editing newspapers and teaching journalism. That door has closed behind me, and I have no reason to think I'll ever need those books again. I will give them to someone who has use for them.

Getting rid of books is a sad, almost reprehensible act that makes us question our actions. One wall of our living room is covered in built-in bookcases, and I love to sit in that room and read, looking up occasionally at the comforting view of all those books, which together promise years of quiet leisure time and enjoyment. By our bed are stacks of books, one on my nightstand and one on my wife's; another stack covers the trunk at the foot of our bed. The other bedrooms have bookshelves filled with books, and another packed bookcase is on the stair landing. A closet contains children's books that had been our children's and now are reserved for their children when they visit. Boxes in the attic have more books.

Books are the most glorious things, a whole world in your hands, a fresh aroma of paper and ink that every book lover finds invigorating. Electronic books are cheaper, more up-to-date and more compact, but print books feel so good in your hands and look so good on a bookshelf.

My wife and I face the necessity of this purging of the books, but we take no joy in it and feel no certainty at the judgments we make, that one book is worth keeping and another is not. We know that the books will remain when we are no longer here, and it will fall to someone else to purge them. We know what that task is like, and we prefer to make an easier task for someone on that future date.

Loss of memory through the death of others

People die. We grieve. We mourn. The ache lingers. We dissolve ourselves in the routines of life, and still the ache stabs us. Some little thought, a photograph, a song, a place, a flower, a car, a book, a smell, a taste, a sound, a flash of light through the trees plunges a rapier through our calm demeanor and our quotidian routine. We crumble into despair.

When we lose a friend or a family member, we lose pieces of ourselves. What died with them was a part of us, and that part is taken away. Our collective memory loses its fullness. Without others' memories to help keep alive our own, we lose whole parts of ourselves, for it is experience and memory that makes us what we are — social, sentient beings reliant on others to keep our memories straight.

The pain of aging is in losing, one by one, those who have been a part of your life for decades. First parents and aunts and uncles, then your own generation, cousins and siblings, and contemporaries, friends from childhood or later. Each of them carries away knowledge of you in the form of memories, some of them many decades old. With each death, we are a little less of what we had been. We are left an incomplete version of living, a flawed recollection that cannot be supplemented or ignited ever again.

If the elderly seem thinner, more fragile, or slower, it may be because they have seen too many memories buried, too many pieces of themselves cremated. They become an abridged version, a redacted life.

Youthful confidence, reconsidered

In an editorial writing class 40+ years ago, I wrote an ode to our generation, the best educated, most activist, most affluent generation in history. We were going to end war, change the world and live happily ever after. A classmate pointed out that it all had been said before. Self-congratulation and self-esteem were hallmarks of us baby-boomers.

Decades later, the wisdom of aging has convinced me of how little I knew as a 21-year-old and how much like every new generation our generation was. When you're 18 or 20, you think you know it all, have experienced it all, and are ready for whatever life might throw at you. From the perspective of a wrinkled face and diminishing acumen, you realize just how ephemeral, how insignificant the transcending issues of the day really were. All the great events that seemed earth-shaking at the time — Woodstock nation, the Oct. 15 Moratorium, the Equal Rights Amendment, women in men's dorms, the draft lottery, Nixon's War on Cancer — have all faded into the fog of hazy memories, their impact on the world no more than a trivia quiz answer.

Every generation of teenagers thinks they can do better than their parents and grandparents have done in solving the world's problems. If, as John Lennon said, "Life is what happens when you're busy doing other things," saving the world is what gets kicked down the priority list while you're busy providing for your family, raising children, planning for retirement and grieving inevitable losses of loved ones.

From the perspective of mature years, I see how short-sighted my confident, 21-year-old self was and how delusional my generation, the one with all the answers, was. Forty years later, the world is a better place, in many ways; in other ways, it is no better and perhaps worse than the world we decried. This world has a whole new set of problems — Islamic extremism, an exploding world population, climate change, environmental toxins, an epidemic of obesity, and so on. From the perspective of having been around the block a few times already, my not-as-confident generation can recognize these issues as important but not easily solvable. Our world will accommodate itself to most of these issues and will solve some of them.

But this world will continue. Few will ever hold the power or wield the determination to actually change much. The human struggle will continue, a Sisyphean labor that ends in the way every life always ends.

Aches and pains remind me that my body is aging

One of the problems of aging is the slow deterioration of muscles and connective tissues, manifested in pain emanating from joints, muscles, skin and limbs. This morning, my right wrist is bothering me, a vague ache in the metacarpals just above the hinge of the wrist joint. I think back to yesterday and try to remember, did I strike my hand against a corner of a piece of furniture? Did I strain my hand by pulling at something? Did I abuse the ligaments by repeated motions? I cannot recall, but that dull ache remains.

Pains like this one are a common, nearly daily fact of life now, in my seventh decade (i.e., my sixties). One day it's my back, another day it's my left side, another day, it's my knee or ankle or neck. It's always something.

I live with this. An ibuprofen will help heal any swelling and dull the pain. The pain is not debilitating. I'm not on crutches or a motorized wheelchair. I climb stairs; I walk (but no longer run, except with grandchildren); I work out at the gym. But I feel these dull pains coming more frequently and more severely, and I don't like where this is headed.

In the times that I recognize what I did wrong to launch the pain du jour, I also recognize that these aches and pains last longer than they used to. An aging body takes longer to heal, whether it's healing from surgery, a broken bone, a cut, or a simple muscle strain. A tightness in my back or shoulder that might have kept me from exercising a day or two 10 years ago might sideline me for a week now.

This recognition helps me understand why professional athletes rarely compete past their early- or mid-30s. The human body has difficulty recovering from the daily grind of professional sports. The time of recovery lengthens as we grow older. This observation is true for professional athletes as well as for old guys doing yard work or some occasional exercise. Take my word for it.

The cold just keeps getting colder

This has nothing to do with global warming, but it may have to do with aging. I have found in recent years that I am far more sensitive to cold than I used to be. I just don't tolerate the cold the way I once did.

I vividly remember my early years, playing outdoors no matter how cold it was. All of my friends did the same. None of us had bulky down jackets, and rarely did we wear hats or gloves, but we managed to play football or soldier or cowboys for hours on end with temperatures in the 30s or lower. At school, we would skate on frozen-over puddles that were so solid, we never cracked the ice.

As a teenager, I walked down through the woods to the creek, which had frozen over, and I walked on the creek ice as if it were a paved hiking trail, clear of the brush and briers that clogged the banks. I recall spending hours there, all alone, oblivious to the dangers. If I had fallen through the ice, there was no one to help me out, and I likely would have frozen to death long before anyone found me. I doubt that I told anyone where I was going. In those days, we just went, and we came home when we tired of what we were doing.

I rarely wore gloves as an adolescent, and the gloves I wore to make snowballs quickly became soggy. Now, I need gloves simply to take the dog for a walk around the block on a day in the low 40s.

There's no doubt that I am more sensitive to cold. I have new sympathy for elderly folks (more elderly than I) bundled in layers of sweaters while keeping the thermostat on 82. I hope I am spared that sort of loss of control over body temperature, morphing into a cold-blooded animal, but I can see how it can happen.

The earth might be warming, but the cold just keeps getting colder as I grow older.

At the end of another year

The last day of 2013 is overcast and dreary, "a winter's day in a deep and dark December," as Paul Simon once said. It seems a fitting marker for a year that had its low moments. My sister died in July, just a month after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Nothing has made me feel my own mortality more than the death of my younger sister. My parents' five children are now diminished to two, and I am, for the first time in 61 years, the youngest again.

A year ago, after we had endured the loss of at least one close relative each year since 2010, my wife offered this New Year's hope: Let's have at least one year when no one gets sick or dies. It was not to be.

At the close of 2013, we put another year tainted by sadness behind us and look ahead with hope for a better year in 2014. It is the year when I will become eligible for Medicare and come closer to my anticipated full retirement age. For at least 10 years, my wife and I have talked longingly about the time when we would not have to go to work every day, when we could nourish the hobbies we have little time for while working, when we can travel to the places of our dreams, when we can better connect with our grandchildren and friends. That day is still years into the future.

This will be a whole new year, one for which we have made few plans yet, except for the plans we had forgone this year and earlier years as impractical. We plan to spend a weekend with all of our children and grandchildren at a date and time to be determined. We will celebrate birthdays and other milestones. We will try again to make those trips that have been just out of reach — down the length of Skyline Drive/Blue Ridge Parkway, to Ocracoke, to Kentucky and Tennessee, to Pittsburgh, to the Rockies and California. We will make a new to-do list for repairs and improvements around the house and hope to check off at least one or two items from the list.

Most of all, we will sit in quiet evenings before the living room fire or on the deck in the cool dusk after a hot summer day and breathe in the blessings we have enjoyed. We will breathe out silent thankfulness for this marriage, this house, this family, this (relative) healthfulness, this life. We will try harder than ever to savor every moment, to recognize joy and to be productive in every opportunity we are given.

I have never been one for New Year's resolutions, but I do look forward to a better year and to doing better with the blessings I am given, when even the difficult years are blessed.

Grandchildren help revive old memories

It was something akin to lopping 30 years off our ages. For the weekend (or at least for part of it), my wife and I watched over two grandchildren. The inventive playing, in which a few chairs and a few blankets can be a fort, the discussions of dinner and snacks, the reading of books at bedtime, the tucking in, the resounding quiet after they fell asleep all carried me back to the time when these two's mother and her two siblings kept our household in high gear.

On Sunday afternoon, we delivered the grandchildren to their home and hung around for a Christmas program at their church. This event carried me back even further, to the time when I was the preschooler on stage for a children's program. In my infantile mind, I was not persuaded that my voice was needed on the songs, so I attempted a child's version of lip-syncing as the other children sang, and my fakery was so inept that I merely opened and closed my mouth, as if taking big bites from the air. I even tried to get the boy next to me to follow my lead. Punishment fed by embarrassment awaited me when I got home.

I'm happy to say my grandchildren were much better behaved than I had been in that memorable church program. Although this day and night of reliving what it means to be parents brought back memories of what our lives were like decades ago, the experience did not revive my energy or wipe the years from my face and scalp. The years pile up without notice until some event registers the toll. You can recapture the memories or make them more vivid, but you cannot recover the years or correct the mistakes.

The grandchildren, who are the bonuses of a long life, help their grandparents keep alive the memories of all the good years of their own childhoods, the joys (and awesome responsibilities) of raising young children, and the satisfaction of seeing your own children mature and build lives of their own. 

As Bob Hope would say, "Thanks for the memories."