7 Reasons I Count My Lucky Stars

Yes, I am old

===== I probably won’t last 7 more years

=========== Soon I will get grumpy and forgetful and strange

And then I am going to die.

But my life, though it’s practically over, has been valuable.

And not just to me…

Or maybe you need to see 7 reasons why?

1. I was good at the things I chose to do in life. More students, principals, and school administrators thought so than saw me as a terrible teacher. For 31 years. Plus three years of substitute teaching.
2. I was never a vampire, zombie, ghost, or… if I was a werewolf in the 1990s. I am cured now.
3. I never had a broken leg, never drove a car off a cliff, never sank a ship, and never was mauled by a zoo animal that escaped its cage with hunting me on its mind.
4. No butterfly in China ever flapped its wings and caused a tornado that did anything more than damage the roof of a house I was in.
5. I knock on wood daily.
6. As a teacher, I lost a couple of critical battles… suicide and gun deaths, one case of AIDS, and one muscular dystrophy. And I cried at every single one of those final defeats. And yet, they all knew I was trying to help. And there’s a large number who live and love me still for what I was able to give them. The scales are heavy but balanced.
7. And I am 67 now. 24 years of diabetes. 49 years of arthritis. 70 will probably be the last 7 I can manage if I can manage any more than now. But I woke up alive this morning, and every new day is a precious gift. Painful or not.

And you are probably saying to me in your head right now, “Mickey, this is not a poem. It has no rhyme or rhythm”. It isn’t anything more than a paragraph with a list attached.

“Ah!” I say. “But I am claiming my whole life was a poem. One big, giant, evil poem Lived with more than a little special sauce on the meat of the sandwich. And can you truly say,

This life was not the shortest, clearest, best way to say something so profound it shook the bones of the Universe?”