Jack’s Mid-Missouri-Memory-Just Yesterday

I woke up this morning and looked in the mirror, and I swore that wasn't me. The guy in the mirror had wrinkles liver spots and very little hair.
I know it was only yesterday that Donnie, Bobby  and I were playing marbles around a circle drawn in dirt and someone slipped in an outlawed steeley. It had to be just last weekend I went to that Roy Rodgers Movie at The Fox Theater.

I was sure any minute now mom would call me for breakfast. I could even smell the toast and bacon.

I smelled bacon alright but It was my wife of over fifty years that called me to the table, so I reluctantly finished putting on my grown up clothes and arranged what was left of my hair over the shiny parts of my head and headed to the kitchen.

As I ate my breakfast, and discussed the morning news with my wife part of my brain was thinking how it is okay to live in your past in dreams or just before your all the way awake, but I doubt that many of us would want to give up the memories and small victories we have won to get to this point in life.

I have earned all the lines and liver spots that stare back at me out of a mirror now, and while I would prefer to have a body that would allow me to do the things I could do as a young man the idea of going back to those days is not nearly as appealing when I look into the eyes of my wife, or my children, my grandchildren, or my great-grandchildren.

I know those would be the things I would have to give up if I should suddenly go back in time.  When I think about my life today in those terms the liver spots fade a little, and my hair seems a little thicker, and I am ready to kiss my wife and head out for another day of work here at the radio station.

I will of course welcome any dream or memory of my bygone years when the McCoy Boys, Donnie Harbit, John Riley, and Bobby Sublet and I ran the streets of Sedalia as barefoot cowboys, or some other character we saw at the one of the movie theaters. I will also write them down so I can bring those memories to you each week.