Will you still need me, will you still feed me when I'm sixty (4,5,6,7)?

I really don't want to write about turning 65, and all the hoopla that sometimes attends it.  The physical stuff (you know, hair, peeing, ED, and all); the emotional stuff (O, God, I'm old); and the bucket list stuff (I really love that movie and it has more significance for me since I do have cancer).


I think, instead, I will briefly chronicle what has become my new normal since my jumping off in Rochelle, Illinois at 6-something in the morning of October 4, 1950.  I do this selfishly, so that when I actually want to look back at turning 65, I have some kind of baseline from which to judge myself on the scale of cantankerous-old-man-ness.  Here goes:

1. I HAD cancer and I've beaten it, for good as far as I'm concerned.
2. I'm reasonably sure that I was a real asshole for much of my adult life to a lot of people - Mrs. Silberhorn told me that somewhere around 1988 on the field at Beyer Stadium when I sent her son off the field for not paying dues. 
3. I was very lucky to grow up in a small town, although it did delay my social consciousness.
4. I think I've finally learned not to fight it when I wake up at nothing in the morning.  

I am completing this first part of this epiphany at 30,000 feet, on New Years Day.

I will have additional resolutions, but here is the first.  It has religious overtones but should be taken at face value:

I have spent approximately 43 years wondering when and how a particular life event was going to happen for/to/with/in spite of me.  I give up.  If it does, hurrah.  Que sera sera. 

TO BE CONTINUED......