And then there were...

And then there were...

By Bobby Neal Winters

My birthday is coming up.  It’s not a special one.

By that I mean it is not a special number like 50, 60, 65, or 70;  not a round number; not a prime number; not a number associated with anything legal.  I will tell you this: It is evenly divisible by 9 and by 7, but it’s less than 100.  

You can figure it out from that.

One of the things that happens to you as you grow older is that people around you start disappearing. It’s like being in one of those old murder mysteries. 

As I’ve written a number of times before, I grew up in a church that taught “the Rapture” as doctrine.  The trump would sound and people would disappear. You’d be left alone to live through the Great Tribulation. 

I found the notion to be absolutely terrifying.  Anytime I found myself alone, I wondered if everyone else had been raptured.

The Rapture in that form has not occurred--at least yet--but people are disappearing from around me, and the Tribulation is here.

Back to my point, what causes this thing I am noticing? We typically hang around with people who are close to our own age.  I remember when I was younger when I looked at people older than myself, it was like I was looking up from the base a pyramid or a skyscraper:  There were a lot of people above me.

Yes, there were a lot of people above me, but I didn’t pay them much attention because we lacked the common shared experience which is the basis for meaningful communication.  

Because of this after a certain age, some of your best friends are your former enemies, but I am digressing again.

Young people--as I was then--tend to be focused on the new.  Older people, as I found out when I became one, have been through all that.  We’ve done the new; then the new became old. We took up the new again. 

The circle goes round and round.

Now I look below me and there is a crowd.  I look above me and see that the pyramid is a lot thinner and I am a lot closer to the apex.

That’s the way it has seemed lately. It has been a year of loss.

I’ve lost schoolmates in Oklahoma.  People my age and younger. I’ve not looked at Oklahoma’s demographics.  I don’t know that the life expectancy there is less than here.  However, I am losing old schoolmates at an appalling rate.  People put on mileage faster in the oil-patch, I suppose.

But death is not a respecter of persons.  About a year ago, I lost a friend of my age who was a consummate professional in every sense of the word. The Fates simply spun his thread, measured it, and cut it.  

He was gone. It was a shock even though he’d been ill.

But most of the friends we lose aren’t from the inner circle because the inner circle by its very nature is small.  There is a phenomenon that happens; let’s call it a melting of our world.  

We go to church; we go to our service clubs.  There are people who--at first--will be missing from time to time.  Then they will only show up every once in a while.  Then they will be gone more often than not.

Then they are just gone.

You will hear someone ask, “Did you hear what happened to...?”

“No what?”

“Well...”

“Oh no!”

One less friend; one less acquaintance. 

In another sense, it’s like we are all standing on a great plain, but it is bounded by a cliff.  The ground keeps giving way, falling into the abyss below and taking people with it all the time, but we don’t notice what is happening until it gets close to us.  We can see the people between us and the edge.  Some are trying to move toward safer ground.  Some are facing it stoically. 

Some are clueless, taken by surprise.  Maybe they are the lucky ones.

Maybe not.  I don’t know.

I lost a man I knew from church this past week.  His wife had passed not long ago.  Suddenly. He’d run an errand.  When he left, she was fine. When he returned she was gone. He was never the same.  Now he has joined her.

I am close enough now to the top of that pyramid to know the stories, to cherish the stories.

The earth under my feet is still solid as far as I know, but the birthdays keep piling up.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.