So Grampa Basil fell again today. A few days ago he did it and broke something in his back; "nothing serious" said my step-father who was once a surgeon of orthopedics, but today he said that if Basil keeps on falling he's eventually going to break his hip, and then he'll be in a nursing home and gone in about six months. So this evening over pesto and marinara at the kitchen table he was talking to Aunt Nancy on the phone, saying how it's either a sitter or the nursing home. Of course he's not going to use a walker. He wouldn't do his exercises, either, and if he had been doing his exercises like the physical therapist taught him then he wouldn't be in this position right now.

I would do my exercises, I thought. I go running all the time, so also I would have done my exercises if it was me. I would stretch and hate doing it but I would do it because I have that in me to do what is good for me. Of course I felt bad or at least guilty for Grampa Basil, but I was pretty pleased that I would do something that a man who liberated Jews from a concentration camp wouldn't do in his old age. It meant I had qualities.

So now I was better than a World War II veteran. An old one, who looks forward to baseball, the walk to the mailbox, weekly visits from the kids, the cat that prowls around his trailer and his view of the pasture, but still. I beat the greatest generation, the ancestors, the ones who saved the world. That means I can rest for a little while. But I know I'm not as tough or aggressive as the old lady who broke in front of me last week at the line into the Hermitage, waving her Survivor of Leningrad card like a pocketknife. And I can't play guitar like John Fahey and I will never write as many words, much less beautiful or theologically sound or critically celebrated words, as Flannery O'Connor; but at least I've got my looks, at least until maybe 35, God willing or somebody almost as willful and Goddamned too at least.

So sharp do I wish were my talons. I hate thinking like this.

A lot of people don't even like John Fahey.

The antipode is humility, which is also difficult, considering that most of us, I think, wish to be better than those who fall short of our standards when humility is something that asks us to devalue our standards in favor of more important ones.

Rats, I don't know where I'm going with this.