Appreciation (45) – Age 69, or 70

Appreciation (45) – Age 69, or 70
Torrey Orton
May 7, 2012

"Happy first day of your 70^th year …"

…Jane said on the way out this morning, by chance reminding me I'm going to write about the latest fact of my aging. Now this is not new, neither as subject of my blogging (though not usually an Appreciation) nor a context factor of increasingly inescapable presence to me. After all, I've had two major hospitalisations in the period between January 10, 2011 and Dec. 19, 2011, with a minor due in the next month to replace a declining pacemaker. This last will be only 30 minutes of locally anesthetised open and shut, plug and play shoulder slicing. Peanuts for health care. Scarcely a day in the hospital.
But I'm aware that being 69, and coming up to the marker day yesterday, is a benchmark for me most notable for its neighbourhood to the real marker of 70. Why real? Well it feels like the entry point to old age.
I couldn't say to a couple of friends why 69 seems so strange to me …like being unremarkable because it is only the entry's forecourt or a life step's set off point and so escaping its due notice for being what happened before the main event - a look at the real thing, the peak of 70. As so often with life, I, like my patients, fail to notice the facilitating precursors to my benchmarks - achievements or failures – and so miss the benchmarks occasionally.
I'm not doing what the aged/elderly/old are supposed (in my historically determined mind) to be doing. I'm seriously involved in four activities of hope: confronting the HoGPIs* at the Fertility Control Clinic (actually, hope humbling), writing about that activity and anything else I can think of that refuses to go away (hopeful) and doing 20+ hours a week of one-to-one therapy (actually effective to a reassuring extent – hope rewarded). I can't remember the fourth one, though as with all fading memories I have the memory of once having thought it!!
With all this, what's to worry about? Only the unfinished business of getting a guaranteed escape clause if the lights come down. Pre-emptive euthanasia is not available here.
Statistically I've another 10 yearsish. And the things which give me hope and/or challenge it, will be around as much from now on as they have been up til now. If I look at this fact from Charles' point of view my real life has only just begun, since I am a beginner at street struggles (the FCC defence), a novice at writing (blog) and an late life pro at therapy. Maybe I'll discover the missing fourth activity of hope. What's not to learn? At least what I think I'm supposed to be needn't constrain what I become.
Happy birthdays to you, too.
*Helpers of God's Precious Infants