Think I missed my 70's

Warren Turner
Crow’s Feet
Published in
2 min readNov 9, 2019

--

Can ten years pass that quickly? Maybe I need to wake up.

Photo by Patrick Donnelly on Unsplash

When I turned seventy, Obama had just become the President of the United States. I was about to launch my ‘career’ as a school bus driver in our college town transporting nice kids to good schools.

When our family wanted big box stores or a multiplex theater, the city was only about 10 miles away. The airport could be reached in less than an hour.

The Connecticut River was a part of the incredible beauty of our place. Various critters visited our deck to eat birdseed and giant white pines surrounded us.

I am proud to say that exercise and diet helped me stay active. Great medical facilities offered solutions to many of my health problems and allowed me to avoid some of the natural aging issues. I didn’t consider myself ‘old’ at all.

In short, I had it made, right? Of course not; it doesn’t work that way. My seventies had their own pitfalls, roadblocks, and detours.

My school bus was exponentially longer than our Ford Focus and I backed into objects more than once. A hibernating problem from my clergy days raised its ugly headed and did not get resolved.

We tearfully dropped off our oldest child at college, a thousand miles away. My spouse began law school while maintaining her job as the pastor…

--

--

Warren Turner
Crow’s Feet

A semi-retired, progressive clergy person who writes personal essays about life at 80 and sometimes tries to be funny. Supporter of all LGBTQ+ issues. He/Him