Birthday boy ...

Initially, I figured I'd find a birthday topic by checking out the old newspapers to see what had happened on this date 72 years ago --- but came away disappointed.

The biggest news of the week in Chariton was arrival of the first two war brides, one from England and the other from Australia. Having no idea how these relationships progressed, it seemed wise not to go there.

Banner headlines in both the morning Register and evening Tribune of March the 27th, 1946, involved a search for the remains of a southwest Iowa farmer named Thomas Worm who, as it turns out, had been dispatched a couple of years earlier by his wife and a neighboring farmer involved in a multi-year adulterous relationship. The gentleman went to the penitentiary for 99 years; the lady, to the reformatory for 25; and the unfortunate Mr. Worm's remains have never been located.

Interesting, but too grim for a celebratory day.

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I've written before about the surprise involved in still being alive.

Many of us, young then, fully expected to be killed in Vietnam. I came home somewhat disoriented but unscratched.

Somewhat later, I anticipated testing positive for HIV and dying of AIDS. But that didn't happen either.

I even survived the prayers of that long-ago Baptist preacher who appeared in my office one morning with a handwritten letter to let me know that his Bible study group, acting as prayer warriors, were petitioning the good lord to take me home if I didn't change my political and social viewpoints. They're dead. I haven't.

Old age, I expect, will prove fatal, however.

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My choice of parents was extraordinarily astute. They were kind and gentle people who loved the land and were careful stewards of it. 

So I grew up in a home where voices were rarely raised, battles never occurred, unkind words about those who differed were not spoken, religion was something other folks fought about and I was free to amuse myself along wild fencerows and in the creek beds and woodlands of southern Iowa.

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I was paid modestly for many years to do in one way or another something I still love to do --- tell stories. And I picked up a number of now obsolete skills in the process. In a pinch, I still can handset type, for example, although my stick now hangs on the garage wall and California Job Cases are few and far between.

Having observed in recent years more violence, name-calling, lying and downright bad manners via the social media than ever before in real life, I'm grateful for grounding experiences that equipped me with a degree of of equanimity.

I'm happy about the hard-won rights now accorded to LGBTQ people, who can (if they wish to) in the West at least live and work in the light, even marry. And only wonder occasionally what might have turned out differently had these opportunities arisen earlier.

But best of all, I have a lot of faith in the younger people, women people, people of color, queer people who now face the daunting prospect of sorting out the residual messes left behind by the older generation --- my generation --- now thrashing around as it passes.