DelBloggolo: CHAPTERS ENDING

Thursday, January 29, 2015

CHAPTERS ENDING

How do I know that my youth is all spent?
Well, my get up and go has got up and went.
But in spite of it all I am able to grin
when I recall where my get up has been.

Old age is golden-so I've heard it said-
but sometimes I wonder when I get into bed,
with my ears in a drawer and my teeth in a cup,
my eyes on the table until I wake up.

Ere sleep dims my eyes I say to myself,
"Is there anything else I should lay on the shelf?"
And I'm happy to say as I close my door,
my friends are the same, perhaps even more.

When I was young, my slippers were red,
I could pick up my heels right over my head.
When I grew older, my slippers were blue,
but still I could dance the whole night through.

But now I am old, my slippers are black,
I walk to the store and puff my way back.
The reason I know my youth is all spent,
my get up and go has got up and went.

But I really don't mind when I think, with a grin,
of all the grand places my get up has been.
Since I have retired from life's competition,
I accommodate myself with complete repetition.

I get up each morning, and dust off my wits,
pick up my paper and read the "obits".
If my name is missing, I know I'm not dead,
so I eat a good breakfast and go back to bed

Why does it take a minute to say hello and forever to say goodbye?

Now that I am about to touch on 70 this year, I am starting to see a pattern of closed chapters before my eyes. It seems that as I look back and reflect, I see the different chapters that ran sometimes simultaneously and realize these chapters are all part of the book I am living, just as we all are.

There are parts of our lives that are groups of chapters: perhaps we can call them parts as in Part I or Part II. They conclude the smaller chapters in our lives and help complete the bigger picture or book.

Recently I went through my old neighborhood and started to re-read some of those old chapters, discovering and rediscovering the old feeling I had back then, as if I was in my 30’s or 40’s. In some ways it feels good and in some ways no so good.

It seems like I lived with a different woman back then compared to the one I live with now, yet both are one and the same. I guess she thinks the same of me, I changed and I hope for the better.

With the birth of my granddaughter, there is a sense of a new world that is beginning and I am leaving it, and so I quietly observe it and wait for the final chapter. There are some things I still wish to complete in my lifetime and some things I wish to continue yet. One of the things I want to hear is my little granddaughter laughing with me and telling me: “Grandpa, you are so silly!” That would be a milestone. I want to see her shop with her grandma too, because grandma never had her little girl shop with her, so this would be a wonderful thing to see.

I hope and wish to see my granddaughter graduate college and get married, and then I will be happiest, knowing I completed my life on a high note.

There has been a lot of disappointment in my life, some of it very recently, but all of it is past and prologue to the lessons I would teach myself. These disappointments are chapters too, and the pages are all turned and so life will go on to the next chapter. When Dad and then Mom passed, it told me the index of life was right behind, I almost see it through the final chapters.

I’m proud of myself for a lot of the adversity that I overcame, my wife and kids, proud of all my nieces and nephews and some of the friends I made through this journey of life in the book.