Hurrah!!

October 14, 1997

Yesterday afternoon, sipping my two ounces of Grant’s Scotch, I reflected that two months had elapsed since surgery at Sarasota Memorial Hospital. Then, by co-incidence, or what a Jungian might name synchronicity, I was re-reading a page in the 1959 “Lenten Manual” compiled by Robert Cope, a friend and colleague I have not seen for many years.

Bob printed a quote from the late Irish playwright, Sean O’Casey, from “Sunset and Evening Star”:

“Even here, even now, when the sun had set and the evening star was chastely touching the bosom of the night, there were things to say, things to do. A drink first! What would he drink to – the past, the present, the future? To all of them! He would drink to the life that embraced the three of them! Here, the whitened hair, desires failing, strength ebbing out of him, with the sun gone down, and with only the serenity and the calm warning of the evening star left to him, he drank to life, to all it had been, to what it was, to what it would be. Hurrah!”

So I drank to that. More importantly, I toasted the Fabulous Five (California, Arizona, Oregon, Virginia, Sarasota) who have done so much to ease the burdens of recovery. You know who you are. MY enduring gratitude is much deeper than I can ever express in words.

Then I read in the current (10/13) NEW YORKER, “... America in the nineties has produced a new demographic category – the Old Old, over 85.” I am now one of the Old Old. The article points out that this is the fastest growing age group. Being radical in religion, liberal in politics, slow of foot, this is the first time I have ever been in the fastest anything.

Perhaps this is a somewhat dubious distinction because we of this category are keenly aware that “every winding river winds at last to the sea.” More emphatically, however, there are those of us of the Old Old whose perceptions are sharpened and thankfulness increased. We meet the nights and greet the days with quiet thankfulness that we can laugh with the jokers and weep with the grieving; that we know and are known; that we love and are loved.

HURRAH!