Sixty-Something Can be Sobering

To keep from shopping for greeting cards one-by-one as events arise, I buy them by the stack...mainly birthday, that I stow away in a special file drawer. If I didn't do it this way, I'd be shopping for cards several times a month to satisfy the over 60 family and friends birthdays listed on our calendar.

For the past three or four years, though, I've found I have to include sympathy cards in my stack. This year, I bought a half a dozen, based on the number of friends and family who passed away last year.

Being sixty-something can be sobering. Every day, the newspaper obits seem to list just about as many folks who died in their sixties as those who made it to their seventies and eighties. I have a few more years of my sixties left yet, but it's a tenuous grip, I know, before I fall kicking and screaming into my seventies.

My father lived into his eighties, and my mother will pass the mid-mark of her eighties this year, so I'm trusting that I've inherited their strong genes. Certainly, I'd like to live many more years, but only if I can be healthy, active, and productive. To that end, my part will be to continue monitoring my diet, keep up my exercise regimen, heed my physician's advice, challenge my brain, do useful work, and involve myself in the community.

After that, it is, prayerfully, in God's hands.