June 2, 2005

Older

My doc is half my age. I asked him if he had many patients as old as I. He smiled, said several, older. For some unknown reason, I found comfort in that, reassured, I guess, that older is possible.

Based on that faulty logic, a recent evening network news segment about a couple celebrating their 80th anniversary should have reassured me even more. The guy kept going to sleep during the interview, each time, gently shaken awake by his companion, and protesting that he wasn’t asleep. He is 103, or was at the time. Maybe older’s not so hot after all.

I’ve a friend and colleague who’s an amateur Jungian analyst and who kindly reads OoN. He sometimes cyber analyzes me by what I write. I’ll probably hear from him, suggesting I’m preoccupied with aging — again. Defensively, I’ll tell him I’m not, that I’ve been reenergized by my diocese’s affirmative aging malarkey.

June 1, 2005

First

Here we are, trudging along behind Jesus, wondering where and when and what, when it occurs to us that if this new administration he keeps talking about comes in, there’ll likely be some plum slots for those of us who’ve been more or less loyal all along. Not being quite so brazen as to ask Jesus directly about all this, we yet discuss among ourselves (something like Abbot and Costello will one day) “Who’s on first?” Unfortunately, we were overheard.

Showing a bit less of the kind of patience with us than to which we have become accustomed, he says getting a place, say, in his cabinet, may not be all that easy. It will mean peeling off a lot of crust, he says, in order to get back to what was there in us in the beginning like when we were children. In itself, that’ll not be all that easy considering our age and experience, let alone if we could even remember what it was like to be childlike. Whatever that means, we can’t imagine running an administration that way.

For one thing, we feared, it’ll more than likely mean associating with a lot of crumb bums we’d as soon as not being around. The way he cozies with such, it might even mean that one or two of them will get some overseer jobs, and we could never allow that, especially if it were one of those whose sexual preferences are not all that kosher (he insists on calling it “orientation” as if it were natural or something).

Well, anyhow, we decided, like he keeps insisting, he won’t be around much longer, and we can arrange things then however we please if we just lie low for a while until all this blows over. Peter’s all excited about this possibility, says he can’t wait to find out exactly what is a PopeMobile.