Inventory

I have in mind a couple of posts. Not sure what to tackle first so I think I'll let my stream of consciousness guide me.

I started this partly because of a conversation with a therapist after a blowup. He mused about whether I wasn't still experiencing the effects of transitioning from being employed to my then unemployment and potential immediate retirement. Since, I have landed some part-time work I enjoy and have gotten more comfortable with not being the major financial contributor to the household, and we seem to have adjusted the homekeeping duties to a more satisfactory balance. Since writing helps me to process things, it seemed to me that doing this blog would be useful. It has been, but obviously I have been slowing down in the last couple of months.

It's not that I am done with this current transition. I may never be, given that our society seems to treat the old as something to be thrown away or shuffled off out of sight. [Worth being angry about, that.] I think it is more that I am moving through it and have less struggle with it.

It is also a season that demands attention even though it also bring things up to remember and to inventory.

I'm fortunate. Whatever my complaints, I have to admit that I am fortunate. With someone I care about and who cares about me for the last twenty years and the foreseeable future, with whatever happened before that long gone--that's worth feeling fortunate about. My general health as well, especially when I know what some friends struggle with--two are working their ways back from brain injuries. I think what I have had to deal with is minor: chronic arthritis in my hands and feet dating from my late twenties, that I have now mostly compensated for; diverticulitis that only infrequently bothers me; not the best teeth in the world due to childhood neglect, but now well cared for and maintained; and about to get the second eye cleared of a cataract and the lens replaced giving me vision I haven't had for twenty years. The worst of it is the changes in plumbing operations since my treatment for prostate cancer--not embarrassing or debilitating, but mostly annoying. It's not a long list and it is none of it very serious.

Really, I'm looking at seventy next year and my mother died in her late forties, my father in his early fifties. Both had been ill for years before their deaths. Thanks to the encouragement of my spouse I am working out three mornings a week and while not in wonderful shape, I take no routine medications and my annual shows me within normal parameters. I have struggled with not smoking. After nearly fifty-five years I have been able to be off of the weed six months out of each of the last two years, and am taking another run at it that feels like it will stick--two months so far. My doc is encouraged and so am I.

Sometimes I think that my general good fortune at this point is something of a payback that I have earned. Whatever it is, I don't want to take it for granted.