I yawned widely and stretched as I sat on my scooter, surveying my newly acquired kingdom. The sun shone brightly from above in a blue sky dotted with explosions of cotton, giving everything a kind of golden cast. Wearing black pants, the sun was also shining on them and had caused my things to heat up to just over 500 degrees Kelvin. I stopped gawking at my back yard and spun the hair around to put my legs into shadow, and as soon as I did, they cooled right off. Now staring at the siding on the east side of my home, I thought to myself that all in all, I was feeling pretty good.
There was a bit of a breeze; about eight miles per hour, and that made it too windy to play with my R/C toys. At least, for my skill level it’s too much wind. I prefer it to be dead calm. I’ve often thought it would be nice to own my own coliseum; rip out all of the seats and turn the whole thing into flying space. Make it along the lines of a giant train table –with terrain, water, and that stuff. I could fly sorties with my Predator drones, attack plastic armies with my Warthog. I could have my own offshore derrick and fly plastic workers back and forth with my T-Rex helicopters. All in a windless indoor calm. Oh, yeah, anyway, I was thinking how I was feeling pretty good.
A bit later, some sort of delayed reaction thought burp bubbled into my brain: What I considered a good day was the way I felt that sent me to the doctor in the first place. I have come to a point where the symptoms of my Multiple Myeloma are so commonplace as to be my idea of normal these days. And, given my very poor reaction to chemotherapy, I am still healing from its damages to me. Two years out of chemotherapy and I still suffer moderate peripheral neuropathy in my feet. All of this, yet, here I was thinking that I was having a good day.
It’s funny how our standards can be altered over time. I find that I am more tolerant and pragmatic than I used to be, and wonder whether that was brought about by my saga of cancer or if it’s just old age eroding away the sharp corners and contours of my personality. I have just entered my sixty-fifth year of existence, a by the book senior citizen eligible for the 3pm dinner discount at Denny’s –and the target of hundreds of AARP mailers. So perhaps at long last the wisdom I have sought my entire life is finally coming as an onset symptom, allowing me to finally have a moment of lucid maturity before it all disintegrates at the acidic touch of Alzheimer’s.
But, today I’m not feeling that badly. I’m having a good day in spite of the tsunami of disappointing luck washing over the big picture. That’s the point I guess. We can find these pleasant moments in spite of the things we face, and their appearance is like an unexpected gem. Value upon value, it shines in a way that says other moments like this will come along.