Anybody's guess.....

I’ve been told that the best thing about ‘old age’ is that it don’t last too long.....offhand, I can’t say that I agree totally with that statement...the problem, as I see it, is that ‘old’ age is finite....it has a definite end altho’ a lot of people think of it as a transition.....I mean, you transition from childhood to adolescence to young adult and ‘middle’ age until you get to ‘old’ age....’n where y’go from there is anybody’s guess....
Mortality weighs heavy in the wee hours of the morning, when it seems like ever’one else is asleep...I know I ain’t alone...that there are a lot of kindred souls out there in the dark staring at computer screens or televisions or just twiddling their thumbs...ransacking the fridge or maybe just staring blankly into the nite.....
Here in old Fair Oaks, the damn roosters are complaining...prob’ly over the SacBee delivery person...I remember when the papers were delivered by kids on bicycles in the afternoons...Back in the good old days, that was almost always the case...at least it was for most of the country...most of the country at that time being outside of the cities.....Cities, at least in the movies, had large populations ‘n newspapers were always rushing out extra editions to corner kiosks where people were waiting to get the very latest news......But not where I lived.....The very latest news where most of us lived then was in the form of ‘gossip’ and the newspapers came in the afternoon, delivered by the paperboy, usually via bicycle tho’ not always.....Brothers John ‘n Jim delivered the Portsmouth Times around South Portsmouth with Jim getting the easy part of the route (well, he was younger) ‘n John taking the outlying customers....it was two-lane blacktop from the end of the bridge (the Ulysses Grant Bridge that spanned the Ohio) all the way thru So. Ports...it was a dangerous road, narrow with hardly any shoulders, snaking along t’wixt the hillside ‘n the railroad...it’s a wonder more pedestrians weren’t run over tho’ I don’t recall a lot of people being hit by cars...
‘Course, during the war years, there weren’t a lot of cars on the road, gas ‘n tires being rationed like they were....anyways, John ‘n Jim didn’t deliver the papers during the war years...Richard Noel delivered the Times in Beattyville when we first moved there...he was older’n me but I tagged around with him thru the streets ‘n alleys....He cut his foot on his bike pedal ‘n died of the dreaded lockjaw...You never hear of lockjaw anymore... nor polio though I knew several people who had that also....I never knew anyone who had to live in an iron lung but the March of Dimes was a major charity then dedicated to eradicating polio...most of the diseases of my childhood seem t’be pretty much gone now tho’ with the influx of immigrants you just never know what’s gonna pop up on the evening news.....
Oh, and big Bob Savage passed away, peacefully I hear, surrounded by his family...