The road is largely untraveled this early. The 3 dogs and I can walk down the middle, and the sight lines are long enough to give plenty of warning of a car or truck. We had come along a trail near the French Creek, one bounded by fields rising east to west. I looked west and thought vaguely that the top of that rise would make good ground for a defensive position circa the time of the Revolutionary War. We stopped at one point so I could throw corn cobs in a high arcing line to my Borders.
Nothing unusual happened. We walked. They sniffed. They ran. Minutes passed. One more day going by.
On the road near a bridge, I stopped and looked up into the branches of a small walnut tree. One bird, a sparrow or finch rested there in the kaleidoscope of branches against a sky of such deep blue. That’s all it took. A few seconds. The dogs remaining patient. The bird remaining in its perch. My head remaining tilted, watching.
It struck me again in that moment how multiple avalanches of luck brought me to that road in December of 2022 just to be able to look up into that heartbreaking sky — the astonishing good fortune even to have been born and then the survival of surgery at 6 weeks of age. In 1952! Being born to good human beings, having enough good teachers fall into my path for me to barely escape permanent knucklehead status, finding jobs beginning when I was 15 that gave me a wider experience of life, being given a good brother and sisters and irreplaceable Aunts, escaping my teens and early 20’s without doing real damage to myself or others. The list goes on from there and on and on. So many instances of good fortune breaking towards me and not away.
I’m in the midst of an enormous number of others in this realm of good fortune. If someone has made it to 70 in reasonable health and not nuts and with so many awful possibilities avoided, he or she does not owe it to character or superior intellect or predestination or any such nonsense. Those factors occasionally nudge us about, but it’s luck that kept us alive — No? How many thousands upon thousands of times have you driven in a car, walked out of a bar just in time, flown, jaywalked across a busy street, dodged a deadly illness, said no to a very wrong but very charming person, escaped the crush of crowds?
This isn’t a post about gratefulness for this luck, although if we’ve experienced much of it, we should be grateful. This is about the deal, the contract.
I’ve been lucky enough to have been born into a life that has been good. When my time comes to an end, I think I’ll be ok about it. The deal is, we get to live and all that encompasses. Therefore, we pay for it with our deaths, as we should. Time to make room for the young. There are few desires more grotesque than a thirst for immortality.
I will miss it, and I’m in no hurry to leave, and each day I’m happy to rise and feed the dogs and watch the dawn come again, but I won’t be cursing the fading of the light when it arrives. I have had a good run.
