The Photo

Yes, this is about living with a relatively healthy set of circumstances.  Please, go along with me for the sake of the argument.

*****

Getting older isn't as much fun when you start out old.  

Kindergarten graduation was last week, the fifth grade's is next week. Giblet and FlapJilly have their own similar celebrations the first week of June.  Between then and now there are a variety of high school and college people touching various parts of my circle who will be moving on to bigger and better things.  

The youngest ones can hardly wait to move on.  FIRST GRADE were the loudest words in their graduation song.  They get to go up the stairs they've passed on their way to the kinder classrooms all year long.  They are losing teeth and turning 6 and they couldn't be more eager to share both those facts with one and all.

The fifth graders crow about their height as they deal with the uncertainty of the future.  They're facing a new space and new rules where they won't be the big kids anymore.  Pile that on top of puberty and just thinking about it makes me glad that I don't have to be twelve years old any more.

High school to college, college to real life - the parental safety net and familiar surroundings and the illusion that you have power over most things in your life all come into question.  Along with that comes more agency, more choice, more decisions of consequence. 

Then there's all of adulthood.  If you make it through without major damage, there's a brief moment where things are just fine.  You know where you've been and where you are and, perhaps, where you're going.  

And one day you wake up and you're old. Not older, but old. The obituary pages are filled with people born in your decade, or worse, the decade before that.  The aches and pains are less easily assuaged.  The music is discordant and the cultural references on SNL are incomprehensible.  

The world is moving on, as it should.  It just seems to be moving a little faster these days, on a train that I am running to catch.

And I don't run that fast any more.

That's the story of the photo change in the header.  The pink peony had outlived its welcome.  I'm feeling more sunset than bursting with life.  I'm fit and mostly healthy and those in the know tell me that my end is nowhere in sight.  But there's more behind me than ahead of me, like the sun in the photo.

Dr. K says there's no such thing as a bad photo of a sunset; he's totally correct.  While this isn't the most colorful sunset, it looks like I feel.  

Up there in the clouds' underbelly, still bright but less intense, a smaller but still vibrant ball of energy exists, casting a light beyond itself, still useful even if diminished.  

For right now, in the youth of old age, that feels about right.