This story is dedicated to my grandmother, Christine Singleton, who is ninety this year and who can not be told that I love her enough times as I should.

Ninety
by Lamar Stonecypher

I am ninety years old today.

My eyes open to silken dawn. I breathe in, my first conscious breath of my ninetieth year, and my ancient heart falters and stumbles. It rattles and restarts, and I draw another breath.

I begin this day with an organ recital. I look at the ceiling in my bedroom, feeling my internal organs falling into place, nestling up to each other, getting ready to work together and get me up, on this first day of my ninetieth year.

Twin urges propel me out of bed: urination and coffee. I read the newspaper with my coffee. The phone rings. Carla, my firstborn, now grey and in her sixties. The news is no surprise: today I'll have a house of my kids and their kids and a few of their kid's kids.

Bye. I love you.

Cake. It'll be like a wildfire if it's got candles.

I read the obits. It saddens me to read of departed friends, but I've outlived my enemies, too.

My cane leans against the table. I don't remember putting it there, but so many things are hard to remember. And some so easy. I have a lifetime of memories, but some are locked away. I try to remember,  and I have the sensation of knowing that I once knew, but then I don't remember after all.

Sort of deja vu in reverse.

I don't remember leaning the cane against the table. I don't remember what I had for supper last night, but I remember nineteen-twenty. I remember standing on a hill in Virginia and holding my arms out and spinning in place, welcoming the day.

Yessir, that was me: that leaping,  laughing child.
 

I have cake frosting on my nose. Thankfully, there were no candles. My house is full of noise: my children and their children. My firstborn calls herself and her sisters the grey-haired grannies.

"Show great-grand-daddy what you brought him," urges a slender attractive woman whose name I don't remember. She married into us, I think. She looks so familiar. If she was a granddaughter, I'd remember her name, surely.

The boy approaches me slowly. He's four, wide-eyed, holding out a wrapped present. I smile at him, and it frightens him. At his mom's urging, he takes hesitant steps toward me. I see myself through his eyes. Me - this old geezer -  great-grand-daddy to this small child. It is a Kodak moment,  and my firstborn flashes it in my face.

Smile and say intercourse. The child retreats, and my wicked heart rattles. I didn't say it,  just thought it. I'm a bad'un.

It's a new fishing reel. A nice chrome and black plastic reel. I look at... Carrie (that's her name!) and express my thanks. The boy smiles, hanging onto his momma's pants leg.

The firstborn hands me a box, and I shake it. Last year, she gave me a carton of toilet paper:  something you can really use, she said. It had forty-eight rolls - I'm still wiping my ancient ass with toilet paper my considerate firstborn provided.

It's solid, rectangular, slim. Arthritic fingers take a long time to open small packages. Paper falls away. It's a photograph. It's a picture of me and Maggie. I'm wearing my tough-guy tee shirt with my cigarettes rolled up in the sleeve. She's wearing a pleated skirt with a white blouse. I'm lighting her cigarette, and Maggie's laughing at me.

She was always laughing at me, or about to start.

I look at my firstborn. Tears are forming in my eyes.

"I had it restored," says my eldest child.

I look at the picture. I remember the day that the picture was taken. She was so pretty.

Twenty years gone, my pretty Maggie. She said she'd wait for me on the banks of the River Jordan. I hope she's not still waiting by the gates. I hope she wandered on in.

Sadness washes over me. Old pain. I thank my firstborn.

The house is quiet. I sip my coffee and look at the photograph.

That is me. That handsome twenty-year old tough guy with the beautiful laughing woman.

This is me. This old dried-up husk of a person with a balky reluctant heart.

I think about Maggie, and I see the long parade of years that she stood beside me. What had she seen in me? What made her stay with me for almost fifty years?

The coffee cools, untended.

Life is a parade. A parade of loves and losses and victories and defeats. I am that old geezer, great-grand-daddy to untold legions, and I am that tough guy who won Maggie's heart. And I am that child, that leaping, laughing, spinning child whose small arms encompassed the world in welcome.

It is dark. I fold my bed covers back and slowly lower myself into bed. I close my eyes.

I am ninety years old today.

Maggie.

Lamar Stonecypher is the publisher of this ezine and the developer of the writing site called the Kudzu Klub.