MJ took me out for lunch this afternoon at the Lodge at Giant City State Park. She raved about the chili! The leaves are in full color and many are already on the ground. It is customarily so on my birthday. Aaron and Jonathon got their Old Dad some lovely gifts and a card that has Quilling Art on its front. ‘Quilling is an art form that involves the use of paper that are rolled, shaped, and glued together to create decorative designs. The paper shape is manipulated to create designs on their own or to decorate other objects, such as greeting cards, pictures, boxes, or to make jewelry.’

I watch the old folks wherever I go. I feel a comradeship with them. An elderly couple sat at the table next to us at lunch. I could see the gentleman who was railthin. He had a herculean appetite. He ate and ate and then some more. I wondered if this was his practice or if he had been saving up for his visit to the Lodge. I pondered if his healthy appetite was the key to his longevity.

Last evening I reflected on our purchasing a wooden cabinet television for our living room when we lived in Elkville. MJ and I had not owned a TV since our marriage in March of 1978 until we bought this handsome floor model in 1986. We hooked it up to cable and I was amazed at the shows that were available including many programs of my youth on Nickelodeon. We had Berl and Fernie over to watch our new set and I knew that the F word was coming up in the movie we were watching and thus turned the mute button on…whereupon there it was in all of its glory in the closed captioning. Berl and Fernie were fundamentalists.

I look for happy birthday wishes on Facebook each year. Each one is a gift and lets me know that someone cares about the Old Man In The Woods. I received a Happy Birthday from my good friend Jeff. We are now the same age for a month…and then he moves on to 67.

I thought about turning over the 66 to 99…but I have reached the stage of my life where it is no longer fun to be assumed to be older than I am…

The future is as bright as the past and perhaps much the more so. As I told the supervisor at our post office the other day when she admitted that perhaps her staff had inadvertently cut the packaging for a ring that I had ordered and that may have been the reason for my empty package in my mailbox…’You live and You Learn.’ What I understood to be concrete truth when I was 26 changed when I was 36…and again up until today…66. More understanding and less judgment. More love and less hate. More being ‘in to others,’ and their needs and dreams. and less focus on just my tribe.