My abscessed tooth laid me out yesterday and today. All I can say is ouch.

I write and sleep, write and sleep,  this tooth weakened me, beat me up. I’m getting stronger slowly, popping my over-the-counter pills.

The little tooth became much bigger and tougher than me; we parted company violently and without good wishes.

I miss it; you can see it when I smile. Maria says I need not bother about putting a new tooth in there. She likes me just the way I am.

Imagine that. But I’m not sure about that open space out front.

Whenever I lay down for a while, and Zinnia is at my side, and Maria is making her magic in her studio, and the phone is quiet and the storm quieting the roads,  and I am resting, I think about my life, especially my future.

I get thoughtful, reflective, meditative. Getting sick is cleansing; there is time to think and look back.

I think about Joseph Campbell’s “Wise Old Man, (and woman),” a mythical figure who looks back on life from the perspective of what he called “Elderhood” – and making discoveries about himself or others.

The Wise Old Man becomes a mentor, even if he is neither old nor wise.

When you reach an advanced age, wrote Campbell in “The Power Of Myth,”  and “look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order or plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little moment turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot.”

The gift of years is perspective, the long view; when I look back on my life, I see it from a completely different perspective than when I lived it. I no longer waste time on the smaller failures and betrayals.

And I like where I have come to be.

I think I’ve made my final move. I am where I want to be through the end, with the person I want to be with. I’m not there yet, but the end is a lot closer to me than the beginning, and I don’t want to hide from it either.

I am changing as I drift to elderhood; I am not the wise old man of the myth that Campbell writes about, the Yoda, the Socrates, the Mentor. I am not the angry or excitable one either.

Life sometimes disappoints me, but it rarely surprises me. I think my writing keeps pace with my spirit; we are both growing together.

More and more, I am the man William James spoke of in that wonderful statement he made that I posted on my blog earlier in the day. I am calmer, for sure, and wiser, of course. How could I not be?

I have not lived a life of regrets, and almost every day, I realize that I need much less than I always thought I needed and worked so frantically to have.

I realized that fear is just geography, a space to cross. It has only as much meaning as I choose to give it, and it doesn’t interest me much anymore. I suppose to many people, there is nothing scarier than death; why waste so much time on tiny fears?

When death comes, I think I’ll be prepared. Is there a choice?

I’ve already had a good long run; I’ve lived my fair share of life. I will accept with humility the time I have left, I mean to use it well.

I understand the meaning of letting go. I understand the rarity of real friends. I understand the importance of acceptance of life as it is, not as I always wanted it to be. I am grasping the almost hopelessly flawed nature of human beings.

I don’t think we were meant to go on forever as a species. We are too broken and crippled.

But there are so many things we do well, and I am doing as many of them as I can squeeze into one life.

Like James, I am done with great things and big plans.  Ambition is somewhat pointless when you get to be 73. I never imagined I would get that far.

I am no longer looking to save the world, nor do I feel responsible for it.

I need to find grace and leave the future of things to others, to the young, who will have to live it all through.

When ambition fades, so does envy and much stress. I don’t see big success in my future. However, my blog’s success has brought me pride and a sense of accomplishment, well after some people have already downsized themselves into invisibility and irrelevance.

I guess I am still too ambitious for that.

My life these days is much more about small acts of great kindness, the tiny, invisible loving human forces that work from individual to individual, writes James, “creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillaries.”

Once a week, I drive with Maria to Vermont to pick up a Margherita Pizza for $14.95. We pick it up in Vermont and drive it home, talking all the way. Sometimes I doze off while she is driving, as older people do.

Mostly we talk about bugs, plants, books, friends, and family. I don’t know that I can be any happier than I am on these pizza runs; it will be one of my best coronavirus memories.

When we came in to pick up the pizza last time, the frantic girl at the counter smiled and told her co-worker, “oh, they usually come in earlier in the day.” We were in.

My life is about getting a text message from Sa Lin today, thanking you and me to pay his tuition this year and give his mother enough gift cards to feed her family with warm, nutritious food all year.

“Thank you so much, God Bless,” wrote Sa. “We more happy now.” I didn’t even know about his sister, who had epilepsy and can get some medicine that she needs.

Those words mean more to me than anything but Maria. “More happy now” is a good place to be when you have suffered what this family suffered. What a gift to be able to do that.

I think love and compassion are like that. It is not loud, nasty, or big like politics is. It creeps through the crannies of the world; it doesn’t shout. I no longer have any big plans for my life, just small ones.

I can’t save the world or even a good-sized chunk of it. That’s for the young. I can do what I can do. Today I got outside long enough to take some ice storm photos. I love taking those photos; I rush into the house and show them to Maria, who scolds me for being out in the cold without a jacket.

How I love being loved.

My plans are much easier to carry out than those I used to have, which brought me to failure much more than success. There is certainly wisdom on that.

Older people talk about death, but I have come to see death in a particular way. Whenever someone I love or care about dies, lower my head and give thanks for knowing them. I won’t go through these years in mourning or grief. That is not the way a meaningful life should end.

By nature, life is sad, but that is only one thing that life is.

Loss is not a choice; suffering is, I have discovered.

Whenever I think about my life – I have no use for nostalgia, just understanding – I go back to asking myself what a good life is really about. I am getting closer to one, yet I hesitate to be certain about what a good really is.

Joseph Campbell was helpful to me; he wrote that a good life is one hero’s journey after another. Over and over again, you are called to the realm of adventure; you are called to new horizons.

Each time, there is the same problem. Do I dare? And then, if you do dare, the dangers are there, and the help also, and the fulfillment or the fiasco.

There is always the possibility of a fiasco.

But here is always the possibility of bliss.

Because I am getting to be a wise old man, I am lucky. I’ve known fiasco, and I’ve known bliss. Over and over again. That, to me, is the good, good life.