Happy Birthday to Me!

My wife punched me last night. It was a 12:01 AM! “Happy Birthday,” she said. I said, “Big deal.” Well, I guess 83 years old is some kind of a big deal. Whew! Looking back I do not know where it has gone. Seems like just yesterday I was nine years old…fifteen…twenty-five…Fifty. And here I am looking back on the terrain with all it’s ups and downs and rocks and hills and rivers and tears and laughter and wonder.

All I can really say to God and to many, many out there is: Thanks for the memories. Funny—but looking back I don’t remember much of the misery and the depression—which has plagued me all my life—or those mean ones along the way that made it hard and difficult. I don’t remember many of their faces or the times when I did not want to get out of bed and face the sad music of that particular day. Thank God—most of that has disappeared. 

But what I do remember are the faces and the names and the occasions and the fun and laughter and the sheer joy of being part of it all. Of course, I don’t think of this every day—but on my birthday I do have to stop and remember and burn a candle before the altar to the Lord God and I don’t know how many of you out there, too.

That little shy boy growing up in that little four-room house across from the mill—I sometimes wondered where I would go and what I would do. There were plenty of rocks in my road as there were in everybody’s. 

Yet “through many dangers, toils and snares” I have already come—the old song reminds me that the grace really has led me this far and hopefully this grace will lead me home. 

When Dag Hammarskjold was the first Secretary of the United Nations he kept a diary and wrote his musings every birthday. And one year he wrote: “For all that has been —thanks. For all that shall be—yes.”

Maybe I ought to concentrate on the “has been” for I am not yet sure what the “yet to be” will bring. I do hope when it comes day after day I can mostly say yes. I was the first one in my family to go off to college. And I still remember with great fondness those moments when everything around me dazzled. And then there was Seminary and marriage and church after church. Six in a row. And nine Interims after that I think. 

When I sorta retired in 2000 my church in Birmingham gave me quite a send-off. They invited people that I had known to be come be part of that wonderful evening. And family came. And friends came. And people came from every church I had served. The next morning of my last Sunday there I told those that came it was the best funeral I had ever been to. And I entitled the sermon “Gravy” which came from a poem by Raymond Carver. And these are his words:

“No other word will do. For that’s what it was. Gravy.

Gravy, these past ten years.

Alive, sober, working, loving and

being loved by a good woman. Eleven years 

ago he was told he had six months to live

at the rate he was going. And he was going 

nowhere but down. So he changed his ways

somehow. He quit drinking! And the rest?

After that is it was all gravy, every minute

of it, up to and including when  he was told about, 

well, some things were breaking down and

building up inside his head. ‘Don’t weep for me,’

he said to his friends,. ‘I’m a lucky man.

I’ve had ten years longer than or anyone 

expected. Pure gravy. And don’t forget it.’”

I did not travel his circuitous journey—but I identify with this poem. Folks, it really has been, despite it all: gravy.

And out there, living and dead, are so, so many that have been part of it all. Not to speak of my wife and two kids and my larger family. I could not have made it without them. But more. Dogs and books and food like macaroni cheese and banana puddings and hot dogs covered in chili. Cats, too. Flowers...flowers...flowers. And churches with little tiny steeples and one or two with high tall steeples. And Princeton surrounded by all my buddies and vacations at the beach and New York City and “far away places with strange sounding names.” On our first trip to Paris I asked my wife, “Did you 

think we would be here?” And she said, “Sure.” She always believed—even when I did not. Raymond Carver entitled the dedication of that books of poems I just quoted from in this wonderful way: Tess. Tess. Tess. Tess. And so across the whole of it all I would write my dedication this way: Gayle. Gayle. Gayle. Gayle.

I could go on and on, but as my friend John Claypool used to say: “Life is gift.” And he was right. Gift…gravy…gift…gravy…over and over and again and again. So here I am feeling some days as old as Moses. He looked out on a land he could never enter and misty-eyed he must have wiped the tears. Looking back, I really think I crossed the river and found it was better, much better than I ever, ever realized. Yes. Yes. Yes.

—Roger Lovette / rogerlovette.blogspot.com