Thoughts on an Eighty-Sixth birthday 

By: Lorenzo Dee Belveal

Boys and girls still in your formative years:

Greetings to each and every one of you. I hark back to those halcyon 
times when we were all young, adventurously inclined and sufficiently vigorous to allow us to indulge our most outlandish inclinations.

Ah! Those were the days!!

The veritable flood of warm wishes on the occasion of my eighty-sixth 
birthday serves to remind me how unlikely it was/is that I survived this dangerous world for long enough to vote - much less to have made it to a fulsome sixteen-year ad-endum beyond the the biblically suggested "three-score-and-ten" mark as an inferred upper limit on human survival. 

Verily! Had I devoted my misspent youth to cleanliving, self-improvement and the cultivation of uplifting friendships - instead of frittering those
those years of priceless oportunity away in feckless pursuit of life-threatening and fate-challenging ventures -because they "felt good" at the time - I could easily be well on my way to establishing a modern survival record that would threaten the record of Methuselah.

But, of course, what is done is done - "and, having writ, the finger moves on" leaving each of us to cope with the lamentable list of of the foolish indulgences we involved in loose-living and self -gratification. I could weep for my prodigality with which I squandered my hours and days in life-
shortening gambits - that I might have more beneficially devoted to self -
improvement and making this world a better place for all of us.

...... but I shan't, because even in retrospect those frivolities (and worse) seem much too precious to have been missed, in exchange for another hundred years or so of sterile do-goodery.

At what price might I have opted to pass up my involvement with 
C.............., the enchanting waitress in the Paul Harvey restaurant in Cheyenne, Wyoming, whose nubile breasts occupied unlikely - but fortuitous positions on her shoulder-blades? Or the precious little carnival midget, who constantly longed for involvement in the same kinds of athletics as the "big girls"can do.

Truly, life is a constant learning experience and each of these (misadventures?) taught me things I could never have learned otherwise. I treasure each one of them in my dotage.

So, I thank each and all of your for adding your own "frosting" atop my 
86th birthday cake. I dissuade you in the sternest terms from viewing this milestone as marking the end of things; rather the onset of a new beginning. In a mere fourteen years I shall enter on my second century. -- With my practice, I can almost do that under water!  

Stay tuned! Who among us can can undertake to divine the breathtaking, 
hair-raising adventures that await us as the 21st Century picks up steam?

As for me, I can hardly wait!

As for all of you, I abjure you against wasting your precious days in 
abstinence and similar reputedly comendable time-wasting. From my lofty chronological pinnacle, I urge you to take your turn on every ride in this amusement park we call "life". 

Certainly this kind of venturesome behavior opens the possibility for an unforseen end to things. But even this seems preferable to the lukewarm
existences of those cautions souls who spend their lives seeking to stay 
safely out of harms way. 

They most likely die without a scar to show, or a single riveting memory 
to entertain them through an endless - and endlessly boring - eternity.

Onward and Upward!!

The (Almost) immortal Lorenzo

Copyright: August, 2004

Lorenzo Dee Belveal