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Shakespeare tells us concerning youth: “My salad days / When I was green in judgement, cold in blood.”
If “salad days” represent my youth, then I must be on my second course of dessert. Where did time go? I once had so much of it, now people are telling me that I don’t look well. I overheard one of my daughters the other day saying to my wife, “What happened to Daddy?” as if to suggest I had been in an accident of some sort. It is simply old age, period.
There was once a time when I would fling myself from my bed in the morning, ready for whatever the world had for me, pounding my chest with robustness. Now, I open one eye to gauge the distance between my feet and slippers on the floor. I then aim the toes as best as I can to land upon the target’s soft in-soles. When my legs are firmly in place, I give a few bounces on the mattress and when I get to the required height, I lock my knees to an upright stance.
But you see the differences between youth and the exalted age that I have become? I am nothing but a mountain of corruption, as Henry VIII was said to have wailed in old age.
I laugh at how sure about life I was when I was young. No one could tell me anything, for I knew all, and I was always right. How foolish was I? Very. But one cannot worry about the past or one will be undone by it. One must learn and inwardly digest the lessons and then get on with it.
I am acquainted with more than a few people who use the crutch of long-ago insults and the misdeeds of others to keep themselves looking for redress, which is now long overdue from appearing on the horizon. They cannot get over their past and so are doomed to relive it in a state of endless and unforgiving neurosis.
It is bad enough that I can barely get up in the morning without being harnessed to my misspent youth, I must keep the grey matter fertile for new thoughts in case they arrive.
I recall at school one of my poetry masters would always drone on about the sly women who had let him down as a boy. He should be a captain of industry instead of trying to enlighten little gum boils like us if not for the emotional injuries inflicted by heartless females on his sensitive character. He therefore despised Byron and Yeats, and their romantic drivel, and worshipped Coleridge, Milton and their embittered ilk. You see what I mean; he was not able to get past the distant wounds of his trembling youth.
In my case, I could go on and on about my wife Kitty’s damned cats, Pericles and Bertram, two great blights on mankind. I first fell out of love with cats as a young fellow while playing with my great aunt Daisy’s large tabby called Hortense.
Up until that moment I had only interacted with dogs, in fact roughhousing would be a better term for it. I had no idea that there might be a difference in make-up between the two creatures. So when I flipped the slumbering 30-pound feline onto its back after a large lunch while thoroughly pulling on its stomach, irritation did not begin to encompass its outlook toward small boys. It was war.
In a flash of fur she removed a small part of one of my still growing ears, while gnawing on my freckled nose and attempting to eviscerate my innocent tummy. When I finally detached from the tiger and sprinted to plead my case through a mist of blood to the aforementioned great aunt, I received a healthy slap on my one good ear for my trouble.
I decided then and there that cats were off the menu as far as civilized people were concerned. That notion has served me well down through the years. “Avoid cats” is not something that should be ignored.
Other than that I have left the scars of my youth far behind me, and while I carry their reminders I do not dwell on them. Be free and attack every day with excitement and optimism. It works for me. Just remember what I said about cats, and aim for the slippers.
Copyright Major’s Corner 2015
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