Heaven can wait … for a long while

The lack of Judgment Day on Saturday, May 21, got me thinking.

Does mankind -- and womankind, for that matter -- need an official day for The Reckoning?

Don’t we, as individuals, face certain judgments, face certain reckonings at various parts in our lives?

We don’t need a firm date in order to be ready, we just need to be ready.

I think we Baby Boomers think about this because, well, we have more yesterdays behind us and fewer tomorrows ahead of us.

We’re the generation that believe we could live forever. We intend to be, after all, forever young.

But we’re aging, and that gives us some pause. It doesn’t stop us in our tracks certainly, but it can get us to thinking.

My thinking is that Harold Camping is full of crap. The world didn’t end, as he predicted, in a rumble of earthquakes on May 21. It won’t end in a ball of fire on Oct. 21, as he says now that he’s recalculated his dates.

It isn’t going to end on Dec. 21 as told by the ancient Mayans.

There are enough other Days of Reckoning that just happen, not because they’ve been foretold by a Doomsday prophet or some strange calendar.

Look at the floods and tornadoes and other weather events over the years.

I’m not saying they are products of a Rapture, but are natural events that, sadly for some, is a Judgment Day.

A visit to a doctor might reveal news of an illness that might be terminal.

I always get a little jittery on my annual visit. I’ve tried to keep myself in good health, have tried to eat an apple a day, but you never know.

My father died at age 64 of complications related to a pulmonary infection.

I’m close to 58.

It’s a weird thing with men, I think, but we expect to live longer than our fathers, but some don’t. I can’t tell you the number of stories I’ve heard or read about sons who don’t live past the age of their dads when they died.

My Day of Reckoning on that score will be June 19, 2017.

I reckon I’ll live longer than that, a lot longer is the plan. I’ll take after my mother in that regard, thank you very much. She’s still going strong at 85.

My point is that we need to live our lives the best way we can day in and day out, not according to some whack job's deadline.

The Golden Age of Geezer Groans

I find myself uttering more than the usual number of geezer groans these days.

If you’re an aging Baby Boomer, you know what I’m talking about.

These are the groans when you haul your ass out of bed in the morning, or when you stand up from lounging too long on the couch, or when you just can’t rake another damn pile of lawn clippings.

I hate geezer groans.

I hate that I’m groaning on a geezer level.

As an aging Baby Boomer, I’ve put a few miles on this body and soul.

I’m wiser for the experience and the many miles on the odometer, but I’m also a little worn in the joints, ligaments and muscles, knees, shoulders and hips.

I’ve had a cranky back for a long, long time. So doing any kind of lifting -- shovels of snow, piles of leaves or lawn clippings -- will produce a loud groan after a while. It might be as much a groan of protest as it is a groan of soreness.

Over the past year or so I resolved and succeeded at losing 20 pounds or more after climbing on the scale one day and not liking at all what the scale’s numbers were telling me.

It’s not that I want to roll back the odometer as much as I want to keep the odometer spinning for as long as possible.

I’ve succeeded through diet and exercise to lose the weight. The diet -- the “Flat Belly Diet! For Men” -- doesn’t make me groan. The exercise regimen does.

Here’s what this week’s gym schedule looks like so far:

Monday - 5 mile treadmill run, 48:44.97

Tuesday - TreadClimber, 1:00:00

Wednesday - Group stationary bike exercise class (Spinning, for the unitiated), 1:00:00

Thursday - Lap swim, 30:00

Friday - Xtrainer, 30:00

This followed by equal parts Ibuprofen/Jack Daniels.

The push to keep the excess pounds at bay has its residual effects -- occasional soreness and stiffness … and the groans.

And there are the groans of expectation and anxiety.

You know how it is. You’ve got to do something you don’t want to do. See someone you don’t want to see. Feel something you don’t want to feel.

So you groan.

It’s a way to prep, to steel yourself for the inevitable. The root canal I had this week comes to mind.

Geezer groans are part of the physical and emotional part of growing old.

But here’s the challenge: Don’t grow old.

Let’s age but let’s not get old.

Generations and their wars

The parents of Baby Boomers had VJ Day.

Baby Boomers had the fall of Saigon.

The children of Baby Boomers have the killing of Osama bin Laden.

Every generation has its war, and every generation has a penultimate moment in that war.

It was interesting to me this week in all the footage I saw of the celebrations of the death of bin Laden -- the man behind the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 -- were Millennials, the children of Baby Boomers.

I didn’t see any older people, just younger people celebrating in a way that was reminiscent of the VJ Day celebrations.

The war that of the generation of my children is the Global War on Terror.

It is fought in Afghanistan, though it’s not confined there. It was fought in Iraq, though history will debate whether terror or some other political issue motivated that fight. It is fought wherever the terror network is found.

And over the weekend it was taken into Pakistan where the Navy SEALS found and killed bin Laden on orders from President Barack Obama after a search that started 10 years ago.

World War II was the fight of the parents of Baby Boomers. It was the Greatest Generation that returned and rose up from that war to create the massive middle class that most Baby Boomers were born into and grew up in.

For Baby Boomers the Vietnam War was defining it how differently it was received.

We went there to protect South Vietnam from North Vietnam and the perceived domino effect of Chinese Communism taking over the entirety of Southeast Asia.

It was unpopular. It divided the country politically. Some Boomers chose to take up the fight in Vietnam, others were drafted into the fight, others found ways to avoid the fight. Some Boomers took up the fight against the war in the streets of college campuses.

On April 30, 1975 when Saigon, the capitol of South Vietnam, fell to the North Vietnamese it was met by the nation with a sigh of relief, not celebration.

The Baby Boomer war ended with a whimper.

The War on Terror isn’t over, it just reached an important mile marker with the killing of the man who brought terror to the United States.

I doubt that this particular war will have a defining moment when it ends, if it ends at all.

We can pull out of Iraq. We can pull out of Afghanistan, now this country’s longest active combat engagement.

But there won’t be a VJ Day. There won’t be a fall of Saigon. And that’s why the death of bin Laden is important.

The celebration that has accompanied the killing needs to be tempered by reflection of the time and treasure, in human and financial terms, that this war has extracted.

Every war, no matter the generation, comes with a high price.