June 3, 2025: The Cherry Now -
Maybe everybody does this, not just people who once marinated in the Greatest Hits of English Literature. But I sure do it: I blurt out a line of verse that seems to fit my situation. (“Seems” is key, here.) I can’t necessarily place it, but it becomes my mantra, for a little while. Working up to my 70 th birthday last week, I kept chanting to myself: Now of my threescore years and ten, Twenty will not come again. I couldn’t recall the poem, but I thought I understood the math: the narrator, like me, was turning seventy – three score years and ten! And, as a person familiar with the Psalms, he knew that turning seventy meant he was in overtime. Psalm 90:10 King James Version The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away. Howe...