Midlife Meditation

"I want an official Red Ryder carbine-action two hundred shot Range model BB gun!" "You'll shoot your eye out, kid!" Which is what he did: Though, to be accurate, what Ralphie really hit the first time he fired his precious BB gun was his glasses. Had he not been wearing them, he would've had to change his nickname to Popeye. Now that I've refreshed your memory of this beloved holiday classic, I'm going to unveil my own personal heresy, likely to send many of you flying to your keyboards in protest: I really don't care for A Christmas Story. (In a further effort to forestall the outcry from the hordes of people for whom this is the BEST MOVIE EVER and how DARE I not like it, hey, haters gonna hate. If it's that important to you to know that everyone in the world shares your taste is questionable entertainment, STOP READING NOW, before your feelings can be hurt; and before you fill up my comment boxes with righteous indignation, ...

Yesterday I got a reprieve. To be more specific, a couple of months ago, in preparation for my first physical with my new Kaiser Permanente primary care doctor I submitted a stool sample. It was a minor icky inconvenience, and I thought little of it at the time. But then I got a note on my phone's Kaiser app that there was a message for me: a new test result. Opening the message, I learned that there was blood in the sample. I saw the doctor and talked with her about the test. I'd had a colonoscopy less than two years ago, and while some polyps were removed, they were benign, so she thought there was very little chance I had anything to worry about. Even so, she thought I'd better play it safe, and have another colonoscopy. So the day after Christmas, I did my prep: a liquid diet, massive doses of laxative, and I'll spare you the obvious details of what happened then. Friday morning, Amy drove me to the hospital, and I was speedily checked in, undressed, hooked...

You know the story of Charles Dickens's "A Christmas Carol," but I'm going to retell it anyway: Ebenezer Scrooge, a miserly moneychanger, is visited on Christmas Eve by four ghosts: his deceased partner, Jacob Marley, who warns him that his stinginess will doom him to a life and afterlife of loneliness and pain; the ghost of Christmas past, who shows him through a montage of memories how he became the man he is; the ghost of Christmas present, who shows him how some are rejoicing at Christmas, while others suffer, all of them grieving or berating the coldness of his heart; and the ghost of Christmas future, a silent specter who shows him how little time he has left, and what a miserable end he will come to, due to his solitary selfishness. The shock of the experience changes him into a man of love and generosity, and both he and the world are better for the transformation. It's been told and retold, performed on stage, filmed, animated, digitized, updated, g...