Tag Archives: Birthday

365 days ago I was just past my 54th year. Now I’m 366 days [leap year] away from beginning my first day into my 58th year. It being that today is my birthday completing 56 years after birth.

When I say that I’m really old, my parishioners who really are old get upset with me, telling me just to wait until I really am old, and then I’ll know the truth of it. But I don’t think they realize the insane nonsense I put my body through with extreme sports, as least the kind I could imagine back in the 1960s. So, I feel older than I am, I think. Rough life at times.

My mom said I was the quietest kid ever. Never a peep, she said. I pressed her on this, and she insisted. I never cried for food as a baby, nothing, just a quiet kid. They’re the biggest troublemakers, though. ;-) I got into a terrible amount of trouble, some of which I didn’t figure out until it was too late. My first escapades with the mafia were just as a kid. I’ve touched on some of that before. I’m thinking I should put it all up again. A bit of a fright. A taste of things to come.

Meanwhile, extreme sports continued into teenage years. I didn’t know it at the time, but I kind of suspected that I was totally destroying my knees. That was the case. I know it now. But I was really happy at the time. Perhaps too happy go lucky for my own good. If it was crazy, I figured I could do it no problem. That attitude has followed me throughout my life.

I just received two really obnoxious e-cards from two prisoners entitled hoops and yoyo. They are from Father Gordon J MacRae and Pornchai Maximilian Moontri. Very nice. A great birthday present!

Mass and Communion Calls totaled seven hours today. At one of the Communion Calls I received this wonderful home-made birthday cake. Tasty, I must say. Thank you!

Here’s some of the snowy scenery I saw today on Communion Calls:

This next picture encapsulates one of the most visited places in these USA, the Nantahala Gorge, famous for world championship kayaking competitions. It’s half as much more deep than can be seen here. Just to let you know how much of an idiot I am, the thought that comes into my head is to take a pair of downhill skies and climb to the top of the far ridge and explode off the top and down through the rocks and cliffs and trees at breakneck speed. But actually, I wouldn’t do it, seeing that there’s not enough snow in Western North Carolina. My fall back as a kid in such circumstances was an extreme sport I invented myself, not to be replicated at home[!]….

It amounts to pretending I have downhill skies strapped to my feet, and then hopping down a super steep mountainside, both feet together, as if tied together, with each bound being as much as twenty or more feet because of the steepness. This is really hard on the knees, especially if there’s a lot of distance to cover. But it’s an incredibly quick way down a mountain. Tightly tied on ankle top tennis shoes and thick tied-on gloves are the way to go. The occasional hidden cliff can be heart-stopping. You have to “see” such things in advance, judging the tree top canopy variance. I really am way too old for that kind of thing now.

I think that it is in doing such things that I began to get to know my guardian angel rather well. I guess I’ve taken advantage of him like this throughout my life, until today. Perhaps that’s a sin. He’s very patient with me. I’ve really pushed him, more recently, with exploits with chainsaws and jeeps. Perhaps I’ll tell some of those stories another day. I’m amazed that he’s gotten me through another year. I shouldn’t be. He’s an angel, right? But he might also be amazed that he’s gotten me through another year! Thanks guardian angel!