typodude

While waiting for my water to boil so I could pour it into my long time French press friend for the making of coffee, the thought, clothed in appropriate imagery, strode into my mind of my teaching myself to type. How such thoughts are prompted to be born I do not know. Geezer consciousness is strange and unpredictable.

I taught myself to type in the Marine Corps. At Radio Telegraph Operator school, I had already learned Morse Code and was developing my telegraph key "fist" but was getting bored to tears (do Marines cry?), my active mind ranging like the little flashlight on today's computer screen searching for concreteness in vast foggy oblivion.

Aha! In a desk drawer I found an old 1945 olive drab Army manual (Marines were often confiscating Army gear) teaching one to type -- step by step. How proud I was to place my fingers in proper positioning ASDF JKL; on the antiquated (confiscated no doubt somewhere between the halls of Montezuma and the shores of Tripoli) machine requiring 30 to 40 pounds of finger pressure to activate a key. Ha! I was typing!

I did not trade my M1 or my radio and telegraph key for a typewriter when practicing shore landings for deep invasion. "Stay where you are or I will throw my typewriter at you!" I kept up the practice though and am pleased I am not a practitioner of the one finger hunt and peck method.

Wups! My water is boiling over. Time to come back to reality. But wait! Are not all imaginings reality?

the warm hug of the universal

Hmmm . . . This body still prances around pretty well though one of its hooves complains and its joints moan until movement gives them proper lubrication. I can see quite clearly however that when this horse does fall I will take my leap away from it. Like that happy rascal Seung Sahn once said, you don't want to stay centering in your body when it is dead. Hahahaha!

Now lest you think I am becoming too morbid in my thought these days by dwelling on death and dying, I reassure you that I have never been happier. It is just that, as a geezer, one is aware of the imminent approach of The Time of the Leap.

In younger years, one is occupied with thrusting oneself into the world and receiving what the thrusting brings. And rightly so. Bless all the younger ones. I am happy to be done with that. Now the journey is the journey of Return.

So. Back to the body. One of my favorite Zen questions is "Who is it dragging this corpse around?" It prompts in me a large internal smile, maybe even a grin, and sometimes outright laughter. I greatly appreciate my corpse. It is a forming of my soul. It has stood up under everything I leaped it into, has walked wearily and thirstily through barrenness, has drunk the waters of many pools. God bless it.

It seems to have a capability of another 100,000 miles. But one never knows. I continue to learn how to leap before the Leap, how to dive safely into the arms that contain me and have always contained me, into the Warm Hug of the Universal. As the Sufi folk put it, I die before I die. How sweet! How wonderful! Geezerhood brings many treasures.

geezing

There she is. In the nursing home. My mom. Not a bad nursing home. But still a nursing home. She's 91 and frail. None of us kids can take care of her physical needs. A full time staff is needed. She cannot take care of herself.

I mourn her being there. She is too strong to die. She is too weak to have much of a life. "Why won't He take me?" she asks.

She is the old old. We "kids" are the young old (63 to 73). We mourn her passing. Do you understand? Not her death. Her passing.

We also see that is where we are headed. Unless we are "lucky" and go suddenly. Our kids will say: There s/he is. In the nursing home. Not a bad nursing home. But still a nursing home. . .