Can't get over being a worry wart

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They told me I had skin cancer on my nose.

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No worries they told me.

“We will whip you into the clinic and we will freeze that sucker and carve it off the old Christmas beezer. Of course, there’s always the chance that you wind up with something looking like a gherkin,” they said.

At least that’s what I heard.

What they really said was:  “It’s small, non-malignant, have it off in five minutes. It will leave a scar, a little one.”  I’m 76-years-old so what’s one more?

And that’s what happened.

But that word, cancer, has the ring of finality about it, it sounds like acid, it hisses.

I have jumped out of airplanes, been shot at once with intent by some lousy marksmen, once was enough. Scared but no panic; it’s the stuff I can’t see that gets me.

Sometime in the mid-1980s I remember hearing about something called an ozone layer and how we were rapidly boring holes in it and how in 20, 30 years this was going to cause major grief. Cities were going to swelter and us rural types were going to have even redder necks.

It’s 40 years on and I’m older and maybe a little wiser and I think why didn’t I listen, why didn’t we all listen?

We were too busy wondering about acid rain. Is that still a thing?

Now that I’m older, I worry, that’s what I do. I worry or maybe it’s more like catastrophizing. Done that before and been wrong pretty much every time.

However times since COVID have a different feel to them, more edgy, a lot less secure. End times for many of a theological bent.

And, I’m told, I can’t do anything about it.

Well I can do this: write it down for somebody digging hard enough through the rubble of what’s coming to want to perhaps look at what an old-time, small-town newspaper columnist had to say just before it all hit the fan.

I can and have, no doubt rightly, been accused of raging paranoia and having a general odd view of the world. Well yeah, can’t deny them that, and it’s not getting any better.

Those people who are perpetually peppy scare the hell out of me and they are the people I am supposed to emulate. They also have Everybody Loves Raymond and Friends on a continuous loop.

However, some people who probably saved my life a long time ago told me to have a little faith in whatever I conceived a higher power to be. I knew a woman who used Captain Kirk as hers, and it worked.

Some become baffled to why such a simple program works, has worked for 80 years and will still work at the end of recorded time.

My daily “carry” is a good folding knife, a small reliable flashlight and a coin containing a mustard seed. That’s all you need they tell me, a mustard’s seed worth of faith, a mustard seed full of compassion and a mustard seed of love for those worthy of it: My family, a few good friends and those who read my stuff.

gordchristmas@outlook.com