Three Score and Ten
That's the Biblical equation of a full life and roughly translates as 70 years. I'm pretty close to that now and if the outcome of tomorrow's physical exam is anything resembling what my imagination is preparing me for, it could mean everything that I know and love coming to an end very quickly. This comes weeks after listening to stories about the late Senator McCain and how brave he was over the space of the last year. And, Aretha. The fact is that living things are dying at all times of the day and night and have been at a constant rate since Jehovah expelled Adam and Eve from the garden. If anything, modern medicine has been slowing us down.
So, here I am. I have no idea how G-d will judge me. I really don't. I have done some good things; I have tried to be kind to others. But, have I obeyed The Golden Rule? Have I loved my neighbors as I would myself? That's a tough one. I think I have always tried to put myself in other people's shoes. I have tried to imagine what it must be like to be alone and hungry. I think I have empathy. I think I carry with me snatches of early childhood memories from days spent alone on a city block whenever playmates were indoors or hard to find, a longing to explore and to share adventures.
As must be perfectly obvious, my experience of the world has been mostly benign. I kind of like what I have known of it. I have no trouble whatsoever thanking my lucky stars for good parents and a happy home life. Don't let me fool you. I had it good.
Some people might say that because I have been alone for so long that I have been unlucky in affairs of the heart, but, that would not be true. I have always had friends. People have always seemed to like me. I think had the AIDS crisis not struck just as I was getting to know my own body and what it could do, that I would have had more long-term relationships. But, that's only conjecture; in the long-run, there's no guarantee that the love of my life would not have died from some other cause. G-d calls people home for reasons known best to Herself.
To be perfectly honest, I am rather astonished that I have managed to have as much fun in life as I have, given all the corpses that have been scattered across it. I think my earliest recollection of the word, "died" is when the evening news reported that Oliver Hardy, the fat man from the Laurel and Hardy comedy team had died. And, not long after that, that Lou Costello of Abbott and Costello was likewise "dead". And, then "Superman"(!!!) What did all of that mean? The television still showed their images; they still grinned gallantly - even somewhat foolishly, given the circumstances - from their newspaper photos.
Mass media helped explain the process a little bit. Dead people were generally buried. And, there were places called, cemeteries. Marshall Dillon strolled through one that was called, Boot Hill, every Saturday night at the beginning of those early "Gunsmoke" episodes. But, it wasn't until I finally saw someone I actually knew in life, lying in a casket, that it all came together in one seismic thud. A person dying meant ending up like a dead goldfish, only bigger and a lot heavier. It took six grown men to carry Aunt Tine, my Mom's favorite aunt and her metal casket up the winding stairs of St. Paul Community Baptist Church in its old location on Rockaway Boulevard in Brownsville Brooklyn.
After that, the corpses just kept coming, a trickle at first and now what seems like a steady stream. What possible law of Exceptionalism could ever make me think it would stop just as it got to me?
So, here I am. I have no idea how G-d will judge me. I really don't. I have done some good things; I have tried to be kind to others. But, have I obeyed The Golden Rule? Have I loved my neighbors as I would myself? That's a tough one. I think I have always tried to put myself in other people's shoes. I have tried to imagine what it must be like to be alone and hungry. I think I have empathy. I think I carry with me snatches of early childhood memories from days spent alone on a city block whenever playmates were indoors or hard to find, a longing to explore and to share adventures.
As must be perfectly obvious, my experience of the world has been mostly benign. I kind of like what I have known of it. I have no trouble whatsoever thanking my lucky stars for good parents and a happy home life. Don't let me fool you. I had it good.
Some people might say that because I have been alone for so long that I have been unlucky in affairs of the heart, but, that would not be true. I have always had friends. People have always seemed to like me. I think had the AIDS crisis not struck just as I was getting to know my own body and what it could do, that I would have had more long-term relationships. But, that's only conjecture; in the long-run, there's no guarantee that the love of my life would not have died from some other cause. G-d calls people home for reasons known best to Herself.
To be perfectly honest, I am rather astonished that I have managed to have as much fun in life as I have, given all the corpses that have been scattered across it. I think my earliest recollection of the word, "died" is when the evening news reported that Oliver Hardy, the fat man from the Laurel and Hardy comedy team had died. And, not long after that, that Lou Costello of Abbott and Costello was likewise "dead". And, then "Superman"(!!!) What did all of that mean? The television still showed their images; they still grinned gallantly - even somewhat foolishly, given the circumstances - from their newspaper photos.
Mass media helped explain the process a little bit. Dead people were generally buried. And, there were places called, cemeteries. Marshall Dillon strolled through one that was called, Boot Hill, every Saturday night at the beginning of those early "Gunsmoke" episodes. But, it wasn't until I finally saw someone I actually knew in life, lying in a casket, that it all came together in one seismic thud. A person dying meant ending up like a dead goldfish, only bigger and a lot heavier. It took six grown men to carry Aunt Tine, my Mom's favorite aunt and her metal casket up the winding stairs of St. Paul Community Baptist Church in its old location on Rockaway Boulevard in Brownsville Brooklyn.
After that, the corpses just kept coming, a trickle at first and now what seems like a steady stream. What possible law of Exceptionalism could ever make me think it would stop just as it got to me?