Stoneage Ramblings

By John R. Stone

Saturday morning, November 2, I woke up not feeling too great. The day before I’d been to the VA clinic for a checkup and received both a COVID shot and a flu shot. The flu shot usually has me off my normally cheerful self for about 24 hours.

So I wasn’t sure if it was the flu shot or the fact that on that morning I turned to the ripe age of 80 that had me off sorts.

As I lay there I was thinking, which can be dangerous, and I realized that I wasn’t just turning 80, I had been living my 80th year for the past 386 days (2024 was Leap Year).   We don’t get to count a year until we finish it! Most of the 386 days since my last birthday had gone well. So it had to be the flu shot that had me aching.

That number did start me thinking some more.

Over my years in the newspaper business I have read a lot of other newspapers. I’ve seen many news stories about “an elderly man was robbed at gunpoint” kind of stories. And then the man is identified as 73. I don’t know at what age the Associated Press style book declares a person is elderly. Apparently 80 would qualify.

Actually I have a lot of friends who are 80 or more or darn close. There are people at church, the “senior group” of golfers at the Minnewaska Golf Club, the guys at coffee, Buckthorn Brigade and more. They all seem pretty normal.

The golf group actually included two people who reached 90 this year. Now that is an inspiration. These guys may not be able to hit the ball so far any more but they are smart about their golf games. They go for accuracy instead of distance. And it pays off.

Years ago the late H. K. Vegoe was the number-one golfer on the Pope County Tribune golf team for the late league. HK was 82 at the time and he pretty regularly shot his age or better. He played into his 90s.

The coffee group contains a lot of wisdom around the table. It also contains a lot of experiences and adventures to share, some of them related to the accumulating years. Much of the rest is related to what younger people, without all our age developed wisdom, are missing!

The Buckthorn Brigade is one of the most physically challenging groups I belong to. We work in Barsness Park year around cutting buckthorn, piling it for burning in the winter, painting freshly cut stumps with a herbicide and we do this in areas which are often wet, or steep as in the side of ravines, were machines can’t go.

We only do this one or two days a week for a few hours at a time but it does test our physical stamina.

But the inconvenience of this kind of work is offset by the knowledge we are still contributing to the area in meaningful way. We take pride in that! We’re still doing something meaningful and constructive!

I think Margaret Pederson contributed to this feeling in a big way. Her “Be Kind” campaign caught on all over this country when she was in her 90s. Pat Douvier at Screen Prints Plus told me once how many states she had mailed “Be Kind” T-shirts to. I don’t remember the exact number but it was a lot.

This summer our church seniors citizen group had a bus trip to Medora, N.D. to see the Medora Musical. When I got on the bus to sit down I discovered that Mary and I were sitting in an area totally surrounded by people whose last names started with S. So I said to Mary perhaps too loudly, “We’re sitting with a bunch of Ss.” One of the men, who was hard of hearing, thought I was referring to a another name for a donkey. We got it straightened out but it did provide a few good laughs.

So the years are adding up as are the experiences and the stories.

Mary got me several birthday cards this year and placed them around places I frequent around the house. There was one on my pillow, one by my easy chair and one on the toilet bowl of the bathroom toilet I frequent first in the morning!           

Let the years and the fun roll on!