At 6:00 last night, I stopped working. I put my bamboo stool in my car and headed out to see some friends.
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First I went to see Jeanne whose husband and daughter died just a year ago. I put my bamboo bench on her front porch and told her to go get a chair so we could visit through the screen door. She took a picture of me through her screen.
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Then I went to see Carolyn, my same age – her on her side of the screen door and me on her porch. We roomed together at the Red River Encampment in NM last year. We visited about twenty minutes while a nosey bird in a nearby tree squawked at us.
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Then I stopped at a grocery store around the corner and drove up near the door and waited. Finally a young lady came out smiling and I called out to her asking if she could do me a favor. She had a store shirt on and said yes. I gave her a $10 bill and told her I was 80 years old today. I asked her to go to the bakery dept. and picked out a 6″ cake for me. She came back after a while with the cake and said she knew the baker and the baker put “Happy Birthday” on the top. Oh, and I got $5 change.
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Then I drove over to see my friend, Linda, who has been blind all her life. As always, we visited through her screen door. These new ones people can’t see through and that always annoys me. Didn’t bother Linda since she’s blind anyway.
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It was getting dark, so I grabbed up my bench and resumed my birthday party.
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I drove to see Billie who lost her husband just a few months ago and still reeling from it. She kept insisting I come inside, but I would have been black listed by her daughters who insisted the first of March she not go to church without long sleeves and gloves on (nearly 100 degrees here by then). So she sat on her side of her door and me on the outside. JJ, her husband’s little black and white dog, always liked me and began annoying her because I wasn’t coming in to see him. Finally, she let him out and he jumped up into my lap.
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When it was nearly 8:00 and pretty much dark, I drove on home. I still had two of my Muslim English students to grade, so did that until 9:00 ish.
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Then I turned on Netflix and saw that end-of-the-world flick where there’s a steel “ark” that looks like a tank in China that will hold zillions of people and the star of the show gets there with his family from the US as the earthquakes do their thing. The boat rides a tidal wave of all the oceans and ends up on Mount Everest (not Ararat, but close enough), and everyone on the ship walks out into a brave new world.
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While watching that, I got out my birthday cake, determined to eat the WHOLE thing. Well, that didn’t work. Only able to eat half of it and am paying for it today.
So, that is how I spent the last few hours of my first day of being 80 during a pandemic.
It is morning. The sun is red and gold with excitement, for you returned to earth life on a Sunday morning after all the earthquakes. You showed the world how you are indeed God. You light up the world and brighten my day. You bring love and laughter into my life and the stars sing. You take a step and the earth quakes. You breathe and the oceans roll. You smile and the deserts awaken. Ah, Lord God, you are my world.
STEPHEN: UNLIKELY MARTYR 
