"Aging.............."

Fairytales can come true; it can happen to you if you’re young at heart. For it’s hard, you will find, to be narrow of mind, if you’re young at heart”………Carolyn Leigh lyrics; Johnny Richards music; Frank Sinatra making it immortal

With the recent continual visitation of rain, albeit showers rather than downpour, the soccer field at the nearby park has been rendered too muddy for me to attempt any orbits. Exercise for the last few days, therefore, has been a matter of driving out to the church gymnasium where thirty-three laps around the running track equates to two and a half miles and usually there’s nobody else there. The weather, however, has also forced our Daycare people off the playground. They’ve been using the lower portion, turning the kids loose with two or three basketballs. Friday, though, I stepped through the door to discover the whole lot occupying the upper level, my predetermined route full of little diddles chasing each other all over the place while the three young women watching over them sat on a bench there in the corner. It was like “surfing” the hallways at the Elementary school when the final bell announced it time to load the busses at the end of the day, only this flow was more chaotic, tiny individuals inventing games of various nature: war, tag, balloon toss, one little girl herding four or five imaginary pigs. Nonetheless, neither rain, sleet, snow, nor such enormous volume of pre-kindergarten energy was going to stop this old man from his appointed rounds. In truth, it was forty-five minutes of dodging this one, avoiding collision with that one. If I growled, they giggled. A couple pointed their fingers and shot me. I shot back. I’m not sure who had more fun, but there’s little doubt as to who was full of unleashed life. Old-age doesn’t drain you of your spirit. It merely packages it in a body that can no longer keep up with everything that’s going on. Then, again, whether you shrivel up and die is a choice you make, yourself…..