Baby of the Class

My high school chum (aka Trotter) is celebrating his 76th birthday today!  He is a full-year older than me, but we were in the same class in school. We were very close buddies back in the day.  Known as Trotter and Dapper, we were an inseparable pair and shared many an adventure, most of which are best left untold.  

Next month I’ll be threescore-ten plus five!  That means I’m a whole year younger than Trotter.  That means I’ll have three quarters of a century under my belt or it could be said that I will be seven and a half decades old.  Whatever words might be used to describe my age doesn’t bother me a bit.  You see, I’m very fortunate to be threescore and ten plus five according to Holy Writ (King James Version) “The days of our years are threescore and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labor and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.” 

You might want to read the passage again.  Am I really fortunate to be threescore ten plus five?  Charles Spurgeon (mid-1800’s) wrote a fascinating commentary on this passage.  “The unusual strength which overleaps the bound of threescore and ten only lands the aged man in a region where life  is a weariness and a woe.  The strength of old age, its very prime and pride, are but labour and sorrow; what must its weaknesses be?  What panting for breath! What toiling to move! What a failing of the senses! What a crushing sense of weakness!…Such is old age.  Yet mellowed by hallowed experience and solaced by immortal hopes, the latter days…are not so much to be pitied as envied.”   Since “by unusual strength,” I have “overleaped the bound,” or whatever it is that has carried me beyond threescore and ten, I sure hope my days will be “mellowed by hallowed experience,” otherwise, I would just as soon “fly away” given Spurgeon's comments.

I was four-years-old when I started kindergarten.  This is why my friend Trotter and all the others in my class were a year older than me.  Yet, in spite of the fact that in my first year of school I could not tie my own shoes or do a few other little things that my older classmates could do handily, I survived.  Perhaps it would have been better if I had started school at age five? But, if that had been the case, I wouldn’t be celebrating my friend Trotter being a whole year older than me today!  At this stage of the game, I don’t mind being the “baby” of the class!

Sandy was a baby of the class, too,
but still several months older
 than  the other baby of the class!