Change is when you look at a cool pond on a hot day and hesitate because you know it will give you a chill jumping into the cold. Then you jump.

My eyebrows are getting white. My knees don’t work the way they once did. I enjoyed running. I used to run half a marathon each day, until someone told me I shouldn’t burn my body up like that. So I stopped running. But I loved the long distance run.

I can’t even get out of bed unassisted, now. It’s my knees.

And recently? My right elbow has given way to arthritis. My hair is thinning. My memory is so full, sometimes I just blot out my entire life, not wanting to remember all the places I’ve been (good thing in some cases — although not one part of my life would I change; I really have no regrets — and just a plain waste of life forgetting all the rest…).

I am physically changing in ways that I am able to measure daily, something I have not been able to do since I was in my teens, growing, getting hair, those kinds of changes… .

I’d never given much thought to how I’d spend my “later days”. I imagine I suspected I’d be holed up in the Hotel I associate with my adult life. Sipping decaffeinated coffee, and posturing myself to be a great writer — misunderstood, unpublished, but great none-the-less — and scrambling to some piss-poor job to pay rent, thereby furthering the tortured writer personae only my friend Dr Zen has the wherewithal to kid me about.

And here I am. Living in Portland, with a woman I love, her kids, whom I adore. Really I do. Jenifer amazes me with her depth, and resiliency in some new way each day. The kids seem to be growing as I watch them… .

And here I am. With people who only know me as a guy who can’t get up from the sofa without help. A guy who has always had white hair. A guy who … . But they have no history of me like those I grew up with have a history of me.

Those who grew up with me know me as having found a family, now. A family that loves me.

And so it is. Life sneaks up on us. John Lennon was right. Life does happen to us as we make other plans. Snicker at the pop culture of it. But he who laughs lasts, laughs best. And life gets the last laugh.

Now I know how my grandfather felt when my mom and us four kids moved into live with my grandmother and him. An old man, not really understood. But perhaps loved, certainly remembered. But old.

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Okay,
Father Luke