“I Miss The Raft”

To boast of a performance which I cannot beat is merely stupid vanity. And if I can beat it that means there is nothing special about it. What has passed is already finished with. What I find more interesting is what is still to come.

– Emil Zatopek

Possible truism, you can learn much about a man by the books he reads.  The old man read Deliverance.  Then he read Unbroken.  Now he was reading Today We Die A Little.  Shit happens.  Positive truism.

The young redhead arrived home to find the party had already started.  What’s going on?  Going away party.  Who’s going away?  The neighbors, of course.  Do they know about your party?

He looked dense.  So she said it again.  Do the neighbors know about the going away party?  They weren’t invited.  

Bye bye, snowbirds, bye bye.

The old man was celebrating.  Happy to be alive, a little irritated to learn time was running out.

Youth was like racing around the woods, getting shot at, doing some shooting yourself, trying to avoid getting bent over a fallen log.  Middle age, such a feeling, you can handle anything, you still have your health and your drive, you will bend, sure, but not break, never break.

Then you get old.  And every day, you feel gravity’s weight and pain’s blanket and time’s fading, but you keep moving forward.

Get knocked down, you get back up.  It’s called life.  Take the bad with the good.

The old man broke into tears when the doctor gave him the results of his latest round of fasting blood work.

When she said – seemed like she blurted out the diagnosis – “You have Stage…,” he didn’t hear much more.  What?

You have stage two kidney disease.  Could’ve been worse.  Neighbor, a vital eighty, been battling two types of cancer.  Weeks of chemo, then there was the bladder scraping and the catheter twice as big as the last time.  Says he feels much better.

The old man didn’t.

Actually, the doctor continued, your numbers have improved slightly since your last check-up.

And isn’t that special.  Just last week, he had accidentally felt good for most of a day.  He had been actually feeling what passed these days for normal and now this.

Lou Zamperini was a survivor.  Forty-seven days of adventurous floating, subsisting on infrequently captured rainwater, a few small fish eaten raw, and birds that landed on their little vessel.  Strafed by enemy machine guns, stalked by huge sharks, pummeled by a typhoonish storm. Near death, he never lost hope.

He lost about eighty pounds, half his bodyweight when he crashed into the sea.   Then he landed on terra firma only to be captured by Japanese soldiers.  And spend over two years as a prisoner of war.  As a POW, he was brutalized and tormented as his captors tried to deprive him of his dignity.

“I miss the raft,” said the hero of Unbroken.

The old man was healthier than he’d been for months.  Numbers don’t lie.

Labels lie.  He was fine with battling maladies, but, geesus, don’t give them a name.

Hell, that’s not even why the old man cried.  The pain was unrelenting and growing and nothing could be done.

Every day we die a little.  What has passed is already finished with.  What I find more interesting is what is still to come.