It was 10:30 PM, Masterpiece Mystery was over and the old man was exhausted. He made the usual wayside stops and fell into bed for the sleep of the virtuous. It was not to be. After I closed my eyes in a sleep inducing position I did my best to release the flickering images that usually beset my consciousness even at rest. Very soon, though, the pressures of the weakening infrastructure of an aging and poorly designed disposal system demanded attention. Reluctantly I pivoted through the usual dizziness and vertigo to bedside seating, reached for my cane, turned on the lamp, struggled to my feet and wended my way carefully along the path to the little house in the backyard, disguised as the bathroom in the hall. The usual old man’s complicated procedures and frustrations followed.
Fortunately my wife in an adjacent bed managed to sleep through all that, for the same procedure repeated itself four times within the first three hours after retiring. With frayed nerves by 1:30 AM, I rolled into bed again, soon followed once more by the same pressures. Determined that this time I would not budge, I somehow shifted into another dimension. There I found myself struggling with my cane’s support and leverage up a steep mountain trail through dense forest until I reached the tree line. I rested and gazed across the expanse of my beautiful coastal valley and felt at peace.
Somehow I found myself elevated beside my mountain top, gazing at the hillside below me. With no sense of my aging weakness, dizziness or fear of falling I saw individual trees near the upper limits of the tree line budding out into startling white blossoms. As I slowly drifted beside the occurring phenomenon I changed my position at will to focus my digital SLR camera, which I found hanging around my neck, on each tree and clicked the shutter on its various aspects as the budding white of the blossoms burst into bloom.
I continued down towards the valley still in my elevated position at an increasing velocity as I reached the densely forested part of the mountain side. Tree after tree appeared in my sight so rapidly that I could not keep up with the changing scene of nothing but white blossoms until I found myself in the midst of a virtual blizzard of blossoms shining a brilliant white all around me as I pressed the camera’s exposure button and held it down.
I decided it was time to get up again. I sat up on the side of my bed without stress, dizziness or vertigo of any kind, reached for my cane propped at the bedside as usual and turned on the light. It was 3:30 AM and time for my fifth trip to that little house in the backyard—one trip in two hours!
Was it a dream? A nightmare? Or was it one of those near death experiences sometimes cited by believers in some version of a happy hunting ground awaiting them after death? They find themselves going down a long dark tunnel until they see a brilliant white light at its end. They absolutely know that if they proceed into that brilliance they will there be embraced by the Great Hunter himself and greeted by all his previously arrived friends and relations of every generation to live in peace and harmony into eternity.
Well, that was one night. Nothing much has changed in the few days since then. I did think, though, that it was one way to get myself back to The Old Man’s Post, which has been sorely neglected since last March due largely to serious health and aging problems of both my wife and me. In determining to start the Internet publication with that name some forty odd issues ago, I supposed it would be a way of tracking an old man’s changing capacities as he moves through Shakespeare’s seven ages of man as described in the All the World’s a Stage speech from As You Like It.
As for me, I would like to think of myself at 84 plus as still in Shakespeare’s sixth age of “justice” in fair round belly with good capon line, with eyes severe and beard of formal cut, full of wise saws and modern instances; but am now beginning to realize that I have likely entered the sixth age, which shifts into the lean and slippered pantaloon with spectacles on nose and pouch on side; his youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide for his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice turning again toward childish treble, pipes and whistles in his sound.
The old man refuses to speculate about the seventh age, for then he will definitely be beyond any tracking capability for this or any other publication. May he not be around for that mere oblivion and all those withouts!
The End
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