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This year I welcome the first autumn in the autumn of my life; the first fall season that I will really pay attention to as maybe the last one I will know; not that I suspect it will be but we do wonder about such possibilities as we age. This past year has been a very busy one for me as a writer and it was planned. The specific goal I had in mind was to write and publish as many short stories as I could while I still could and publish them in eBook format to document the lives of two men, a young one and an old one. Time has had its way with me and I had my way with it and now here we are; the old version of me reflecting on what some people have long suspected about me; that I have a split personality! It took all of 62 years to bring them together but once again, here we are. The old personality coming to terms with the younger version that now only exists in that part of the brain where we store our memories.
The younger me was always in a hurry but never in a hurry to see how the older me would eventually make out, and that guy didn't stick around long enough to find out. I often wonder where he got off to and how he got away so fast. What I do know is that he wasted a lot of time when he had a lot of it!
Let me explain what I meant by this possibly being my final fall season; I was warned about this year many years ago by my family doctor when he discovered something about me in a routine check-up and thought it best to refer me to a specialist. I laughed at him as I have often been prone to do when coming face to face with adversity but I agreed to go meet with his friend for a second opinion. That meeting did not go well because his friend examined me in a way much different than my regular doctor did; he went a lot further; his examination was much more painful and it left me a little skeptical about keeping an appointment that he made for me with another friend of his, so skeptical in fact that I decided to forego that one and just wait another year or so before telling my doc about it. I thought that as rigorous as this second exam was, the next one might kill me! For several minutes it felt as if he were trying to.
Two years passed before I returned to my regular guy and during the course of that examination I confided in him that his friend was not a nice man and that I skipped the third hand-off from one doctor to another. We discussed my lifestyle and he told me not to make any long range career goals if I didn't change my lifestyle and return more often for check-ups. "You are not a young man anymore and it is imperative that you take better care of your body and come to see more often than you have been, and when I tell you do something you need to do it!" He sounded perturbed at me when he said that but I didn't take it personally because he was only doing his job.
That day was the first day he ever invited me back to his office for a chat and as we talked about things like diet and bad habits he mentioned the term autumn of our lives and he spoke of statistics and reasons he was concerned that I could or might not live long enough to qualify for Social Security if I didn't take his advice more seriously than I seemed to be showing. All of what he said made sense and in the five years that have whisked by in what seems like a blink of an eye I have read one obituary after another of people I have known for years, some younger than me and some not much older and each time I do I see reminders of that discussion. That was the last time I saw that doctor who I also regarded as friend. One day I tried to make an appointment with him and the gal who answered the phone informed me that he was no longer practicing medicine.
That sent me scrambling to find a new family doctor and for a year or so I settled with one that was the worst doctor I ever had examine me. She had a much larger office that was absolutely exquisite with all of the latest fancy touches and each time I would go there I would look around and know two things; I was the oldest person in the waiting room and the only guy. Each time I left her office I was angry and suspicious, wondering if she had a clue about treating men and each time I was convinced that she didn't. Finally I found another doctor who I liked, he was nearly half my age and he and I took an immediate liking to one another because we understood each others goals for me; those being just be here when either of us needs to be so we can work through issues. In less than a year he too was gone, he left that practice to operate a clinic somewhere else. At the moment I am without a regular family physician and I was discussing that with an old colleague recently who said "welcome to the club!"
The club he was referring to is the one we all eventually join in the autumn of our lives when finding and keeping a good doctor becomes a challenge we never saw coming. I will eventually work that one out but back to my old doctor who wondered if I might be around to qualify for Social Security: I hope he is a reader and that he finds this piece wherever he is if only so he can know that I made it. I reached that level this past July and I feel no worse for the wear than I did on the day he and I had that discussion. I also never changed my ways that he said were not conducive for anyone hoping to one day wear short pants, sunglasses and a fishing hat while riding around on golf carts in some warm retirement community. By the way, that was never a personal goal for me so once again he and I just moved on.
I was remembering some of that conversation this morning as I sat enjoying that first smoke and first cup of caffeinated coffee of the day and that part when I told him that settling down some day with people my age and older surrounding me in some place away from the one I have known as home most of my life was never part of my plan. He laughed and said "none of us look forward to that but we're all headed there eventually." I still hope he was wrong about all of that. He spoke of a time when we will be more comfortable surrounded by people like us who will need one another to discuss our health issues with and trade stories of better years when we didn't need each other. "Safety in numbers" he called it; "you won't like being the oldest person in every room you will be in, surrounded by younger people who will ignore you and not give a damn about you if you find yourself in such an environment some day. The day will come when you will want to be with your contemporaries instead of in the company of those who will push you aside because they can."
But like everything else I have approached on my way to getting where life has brought me I didn't see myself as someone who couldn't deal with that. I told him that I didn't look at my life then as a dress rehearsal for being old some day, I was already in my mid-fifties and standing in center-stage of it before a very large audience remembering every line I would need to say when it was my turn to speak. Life for me has always been like a play. I am surrounded now by as many odd characters as I always have been and although mine is no longer the best known name on the program I still have the starring role. This play seems to linger longer than the audience might have expected but it is still a very good one!
I believe it will have a very good ending even though I have no idea when that will be; but what I think I know is that even though I may need a few more stunt-men to fill in for me with each act the choreography has been spectacular. I am acting in a tailor-made role that suits me. When the winter of 2013 was closing and the spring of 2014 was approaching I wondered if it might be the last one that I could get out and still do whatever I wanted. It came and went and although I didn't get out much I did do most of the things I wanted to.
However, in every year before this one I looked forward to relaxing in the sun from spring through summer and seeing my skin change color to a deep tan because it did seem to matter how comfortable clothes would look against it when my skin was more attractive than age eventually makes it. Some days I would spend most of the hours outdoors and by autumn I could be mistaken for another race. So when summer approached I wondered if it might be the last one that I could still do that. Remember, this all started with that consultation with a doctor who wondered how many more summers in the sun I might enjoy.
As it turned out, the summer before it, the summer of 2012 was that one; this year I had no desire to sit outside when those temperatures were climbing into the high eighties and low nineties. I sipped cold beverages in my radio studio where I also write and now all of those days are past, I am falling forward. I spent a good deal of this year springing back by writing one story after another to put the final touches on the third act of my play. I suspect this won't be my final autumn but it might be; that is true for all of us but I don't worry about that now anymore than I ever did. I am looking forward to fall, I am enjoying the cooler temperatures and I will be leaving the house and returning to it more than I have since last winter.
I won't talk about winter yet because we probably still have a few months before it arrives but when it does I will wonder if it might be my last. These are things that I think we should all think about and talk about when we arrive at a certain point in our journeys because if we don't we may end up angry with ourselves someday that we didn't. I know I would be if left a lot of things on the table too long to matter to anyone. I wouldn't want my work to seem worth more than it is after all of my seasons are over than it did while I was scripting each one. I won't know one way or the other then, but I do want to know now and right now I am the most contented man I know with how things have gone so far and so far this long and enduring play of mine is on the course I hoped it would be.
The names and the faces around me will continue to change just as I have planned it. This blog I started last week has brought me an entirely new audience and I have no plan to let them down. You can make all of this worth the efforts I have invested by looking for my next story that should unfold any minute now, and in the meantime you can help me know that it has mattered by looking over some of my other work by following this link. There you will find about a half million other words cobbled together that I hope you will enjoy and understand.
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