SERIAL SLOW MOMENTS

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith for the Years of Winter… ©

I’m not sure I like the designation of “senior moments” for those lapses in memory that old folks have. I recall Dee Lemkau saying, when she was terribly old, which means several years younger than I am now, that her memory was just as good as ever, but that, like the rest of her, it was slower. So maybe they are just “slow moments,” that have little to do with senioritis. After all, when one of them settles like a halo around my head, Helen says, “I’ve known you since you were twenty, and you’ve always been this way.”

They do become troublesome, though, when they become serial slow moments. Those happen when routine is interrupted. Your coffee can get very cold in the process of a serial slow moment.

Helen was off at H2O aerobics when the AC guy came for the annual inspection, so I had to write him a check, which meant finding the check book, which I don’t use much, so I got into a distracted frame of mind. I had just gotten my mid-morning scone and coffee ready when I remembered that I had moved the boxes in front of the furnace room in the garage to let the AC guy get at it. I had to get them back in place before Helen returned, because condo garages are very short and narrow and I constantly think about buying a Cooper Mini because of that. [You never see a Hummer in our neighborhood.]

I got the boxes back in place and went back to the living room to enjoy my coffee…and couldn’t find it. Or the scone. I looked in all the usual places—kitchen counters, the microwave, the desk in my study, the end tables, the book cases, the dish washer—not to be found…except, of course, they were in the garage, because I had carried them out there when I hurried out to remodel the box mountain.

But then my cell phone rang. It hardly ever rings. I don’t keep the number secret, but few know it just because no one needs to call me. So it had to be family or friends. It was not in my pocket, because I had changed from shorts to long pants when the AC guy came, because it always gets real cold when the AC guy comes, but I did not remember it was in my shorts, so had to dash around, trying to trace it, and grabbed it finally, just in time to get a recorded message from “Lisa” that I had won yet another free trip to the Bahamas.

Which was nice, of course, but after I had hung up on her, I could not find my coffee and scone. I looked in all the usual places…

They are frustrating, those slow senior moments. They get even worse when we see our friends and loved ones having to deal with the memory losses of dementia. “Old age is not for the faint-hearted.” When I have one of those moments, though, even though my coffee is cold, my heart is warm, for I am reminded that although I can’t remember where I put my scone and coffee, God always remembers where He put me.

Where She put me as a child, as a young man, as a father and husband and grandfather and friend, as a follower of Jesus. And now as an old man with cold coffee, and a scone that has a mysterious missing bite. I might forget a whole lot of stuff, but God does not forget me. That is God’s idea of a slow moment.

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

I tweet as yooper1721.

My book, NOW THAT I HAVE CANCER I AM WHOLE: Reflections on Life and Healing for Cancer Patients and Those Who Love Them, is published in two editions by AndrewsMcMeel, in audio by HarperAudio, and in Czech and Japanese translations. It’s incredibly inexpensive at many sites on the web. Naturally I’d rather you bought it, but apparently you can download it for free on Free-Ebooks.net, It says “Download 2048.”