211022 Sentinel, Comparisons

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The months in a year compared to the years in life itself.

January is the first month of the year and it mimics our first breath of a new life. We can’t control January weather and we have no control over our lives at infancy. We learn to cry when we are hungry or our diaper needs changing.

February is early in the year and I think of it as a baby crawling across the living room floor. Parents want to hold and love us and are amazed at how well our progress has been.

The pictures in this post are above the month I am writing about.

March is when we take our first steps. This is when the first danger comes into our life. We can get around the house and get into trouble emptying book cases, finding kitchen chemicals under the sink, touching a hot stove. The possibilities are endless.

April I think is the time when we learn to feed ourselves for the first time. Moms give us potty training. We take this time as inconvenient while mom finds it somewhat frustrating. She’s already thinking she may have some peace when school days commence.

May brings our first venture into the outside world with our entry into grade school. We learn to sit still and wait for recess. These days kids know so much more by this time than back in my day. I was learning the abcs, printing individual letters, counting and basic math. In Catholic school I learned how frustrated and often mean Catholic nuns could be.

June begins the first of the fun years when we are in high school. Dating, dancing, necking (or whatever that is called these days) being alone in cars with girls. Talking about the future when we had no idea of what that entailed. Sadly I don’t remember progression in one’s teen years. It was a baseball analogy, getting to first base, second base, third base. I knew what a home run was though I never hit a home run in those days. I was close once and that could have led to a horrible ending with the wrong girl, meaning not Joyce but the one before Joyce came into my life.

July is another milestone in life when we go to college or enter the workforce. This is where we learn what we should have learned in school. I was working six days a week in a gas station/ brake repair place for $48 a week and thinking if I ever get to $100 a week I can have a wife, a new car and a house of my own. That goal was possible at that time in this country.

August is romance, love and possibly marriage. My all time favorite time in life. I had a high opinion of myself in those days and some of the girls agreed, while others didn’t give me the time of day, much less any time in the evening. I was then a hopeless romantic and I am not sorry to say that I still am today, for what is life without romance? Joyce was more pragmatic, but she did enjoy my romanticism, she was a great lover.

September I think brings maturity, home buying, happy times for married people and also when there is spawning of new lives. This is when things become more serious, with raising children, paying for mortgages, buying life insurance that you will never collect on. Occupations like being in the navy can uproot a household every few years. Civilian jobs end and force oneself to move to new locations for better jobs.

October starts the slowdown in life. Jobs get difficult to find in the senior years, some end up with menial jobs to survive, others retire if they can. I confess to losing my last job when the Litton plant closed. Joyce and I were lucky to have individual IRAs and able to go on Social Security. Joyce and I both filed to start social security that year. Jobs I could do were not available. Jobs I tried to get were not going to hire me at my age, so it was time to enter the slowdown world.

November equates to the golden years when we look back at all that we have done and all that has happened to us. November was always a bad month for us both. My navy deployments always began in November. Joyce’s father died in November. My fall that led to my brain surgery happened in November. My father was near dying in November. Joyce’s mother was about to die in November. Joyce spent a month in intensive care in November 2017. It came to be that we dreaded every November. This year being alone, I can’t think of anything that could be worse than what I have already endured, so I am not as concerned as in previous Novembers.

December is the last month in the year and to me it signals the end of life as we know it. Those who live through enough Decembers return to the point like they were as infants, unable to care for oneself without assistance and in some cases they don’t even know who they are or the what or why of the life they are living.

My December is not yet here and God only knows when it will come. My dear Joyce’s December came in September of this year. With that written, December is the month of Christmas too. Children love Christmas as did Joyce. It was her month to shine. She loved decorating, cooking and gift giving. She always wanted me to leave the outdoor lighting up as long as I could tolerate it. That meant I would end up taking down the lights on the coldest days of January and usually with a bone-chilling wind, but I did it for her.