How will you stay or even remember young?

Black coal dust on my eyelids like mascara and it was a part of me, for the summers I worked during college. A helmet with a light and a lead-acid battery to help me see. I was so strong then - at least for a wiry toothpicked-armed boy, I was. Breaking rocks with a sledge along a belt-line and shoveling spills, I thought of life as having a horizon with no vanishing point - where mortality wasn't a notion I'd even begin to question.

And then, years spin by. I see my parents disappear and people I love getting sick - some are now gone. I am not as physically strong now and I realize those two parallel lines inexorably grow together in necessary perspective - I know I must yield. I am determined to be happy though - no matter how the path turns - it will be what I do to keep me safe and to keep me young.

* * *

And speaking of young: I remember having an intense boyhood crush on the actress who played Samantha Stevens on the television show "Bewitched". She passed away from cancer nearly 30 years ago but even to this day whenever I see a photograph of Elizabeth Montgomery, I still feel a twinge of missing, sadness and yearning. Perhaps it is more pronounced as a remembrance of what the awakening of attraction and appreciation of beauty meant to the young kid that I was.