It was an accident. That’s all it was. I am not getting old.
I wasn’t particularly tired yesterday, but something came over me. I was on the sofa, eating lunch, watching a spring training ballgame, sipping iced tea, drowsing off.
The next thing I knew, I awoke two hours later, disoriented, covered in iced tea, ice cubes melting on my chest, and I was drooling.
My wife found me. She looked shocked. She said, “Were you just taking a nap?”
“A nap?” I said. “Don’t be silly. Naps are for old people, I’m too young for those.”
“You were napping.”
“No I wasn’t.”
“Yes, you were.”
“No. I was practicing mindfulness.”
I have my dignity to preserve.
When I was a kid, I remember my mother once saying, “You know you’re getting old when you fall asleep and spill food on yourself.”
That’s never been me. I was a fast-moving kid with a taste for danger, always looking for international thrills.
My bicycle had baseball cards on the spokes, and I knew how to beat the Jacob’s Ladder game without even trying.
I knew
the rules to Texas Hold’em, and played for high stakes behind the fellowship hall with Jay Ray, Ed Lee, and the janitor, Mister Stew. To this day, Mister Stew still owes me nine hundred thousand dollars.
Who has time for naps? Not me.
Growing up, I strapped a transistor radio to my bicycle handlebars and rode gravel roads, listening to “Hit the Road Jack” until the speaker popped.
I had dirt beneath my fingernails. I could climb any tree. I was raw energy. Everyone knew this about me.
Case in point: when I was seven, I was in the school production of Handel's Messiah, and the teacher had to write brief biographies about the soloists in the bulletins. She wrote about me: “Sean Dietrich makes enthusiasm seem like an inadequate word.”
Those were her exact words.
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