Childhood and Second Childhood

Having spent a week with the little girls, it got me thinking about my own childhood - from the vantage point of my second childhood. Here we are in our serried convent school ranks. I am at the end of the middle row, left side. Of the two little girls next to me, one grew up to be stunningly, model-style, beautiful, but is, alas, like so many of my contemporaries, no longer here. The other is now a grandma and a New Zealander.

It is a vanished world.  But how quickly our lives go by. What was it Thomas Hardy wrote:  A dolt is he who memorises, lessons that leave no time for prizes.

And yes, it took me nearly forty before I began to understand why we are here and what is happening, and I am still learning.  So just as I began to know what I want to be when I grow up (the question "grown ups" always asked) I found I was drawing my old age pension and no longer even able to hop on a bus. Or to hop, full stop.

But now I hope to go on learning forever. learning Jehovah's way of course, which is a pleasure. And always something to be looked forward to.  I add that because surely I cannot be the only person who spent a fair amount of their childhood in dread of school?

This second childhood is weird. But then was it ever meant to happen to us this way, with this painful, bewildering decline?  The first chapters of Genesis tells us that we were originally made to last forever, not just for the few decades we do now.

August has got off to a rainy and stormy start.  Wednesday was, as ever, my Zoom day - one friend in the morning, one in the afternoon - 2 zoom sessions each time.  And poor Col had a dental check up, then shopped afterwards.  He came back with cooking apples, which means he would like a crumble.

Wednesday night was his Detectorist Meeting. The FLO was there - Finds Liaison Officer to us civilians.  I usually get to see her once or twice a year when she comes to the local museum and I am deputised to take the club finds up to her - the ones that are reportable.

It is a regulated process, with finds being logged, and so a picture of history is continually being built up.

Today I have a couple of cooking jobs on hand - making a carrot cake and an apple crumble.  Plus finishing my studying for the meeting tonight. And such is my feeble state that will completely wipe me out I fear.

A big difference of course between first and second childhood is that in the first you are bursting with energy, and the adults around you tend to wish you had rather less. Then, when you grow up and really need that energy, where is it?  Gone, gone with the wind... oh and talking of digestive matters... but, no, I won't.

That surely comes under the heading: Too much information.