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Don Locke: Looking Through Bifocals

If we are not real careful our sense of propriety slips a bit when we get older.

Sometime back Bett and I were attending a funeral. While the son of the deceased was giving a very heart-felt eulogy, some old guy in back of us leaned over to his wife and said, "That man (the deceased) looks awful old to have a boy that young." Not only did his wife hear it, everybody there heard it - LOUD and clear.

When we got home I told Bett, "I'm going to buy you a pellet pistol with a silencer, and if I ever get to talking out loud at a funeral, sting me in the foot with it." Recently I went by a hardware store and looked at their pellet guns.

Once when Bett and I were visiting an older lady in a rest home, we noticed a book on her bedside table, whose title read, "Growing Graceful, Growing Old."

But too often if we're not mindful we might look at that and think, or say, "I wish so and so would read that."

I'll close with a few lines from the prayer of an anonymous abbess:

  • Lord, as I grow older, keep me from becoming too talkative - especially from the unfortunate habit of thinking that I must say something on every subject and at every opportunity.
  • Release me from the idea that I must set right other peoples' affairs.
  • Keep me from recital of endless details.
  • Give me the patience to listen to complaints of others - but seal my lips on my own aches and pains.
  • Keep me reasonable gentle, I do not have the ambition to become a saint, it is so hard to live with some of them. Remind me that a harsh old person is one of the Devil's masterpieces.
  • When my memory doesn't agree with others, teach me the glorious lesson that I may be occasionally wrong.

In closing, there is a book of poems in the Japanese: The book - Haiku:

House under plum trees
Flowering in soft rain
Open thy door before nightfall

And in the evening of life, when the shadows begin to darken and the cold rain of bereavement chills me.
Let me find peace in such a house.

Kindest regards . . .

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