Well, I recently had my birthday, I am 73. Yup, it surprised me also. So far, 73 is a good age to be. I don’t feel as old as 73 sounds in my head. This post is about me doing just fine, thank you very much for asking. By the way, I’ve grown my hair a bit longer.

Lately the celebrities in the news who recently passed are about my age. It is a bit frightening to be reminded of the inevitable consequence of making it this far in life. Time marches on. However, let us focus on the positive. Life is a wonderful thing to have.

The cliche is every day you wake up is a good day. That’s wrong, of course. Waking up is, in fact, a good start to any day. However, imagine you wake up feeling good, then later that day, walking down a sidewalk, you get squashed by a falling piano. Just saying that would be a bad day even though you woke up that morning.

At age 73, and I suspect for most people my age, feeling good actually means feeling relatively good. Aches and pains are a way of life for us 73–year-olds. Our joints incessantly complain about the abuse they endured over the years. The snapping noises periodically heard when I get out of a chair happens so often they no longer are concerning.

I am sure there are some people my age with little to no aches and pains, however, I do not know any of them. Growing older is not for the faint of heart. However, for me and most people my age, every day is a blessing and I am very, very happy to be alive to grow older.

Age, of course, is a real thing. Personally, I’m feeling pretty good both physically and mentally. I’m a year out from my last cancer surgery. Over the past six months I have been checked over, inside and out by all sorts of medical professionals doing all sorts of techniques. Blood work, imagining, probing, listening and you get the idea. So there is scientific evidence that I’m doing well.

Which leads us to the real topic of this story. I’ve had short hair since I graduated from the University of Minnesota fifty years ago. After a month of thinking about it, I decided to grow my hair a couple inches longer. Sort of a celebration of feeling well.

So I didn’t tell my family exactly why, however, I told them I was thinking of wearing my hair longer. I may have implied I was going to grow it very long. They were skeptical. My hair had been short for over fifty years. They only knew me with short hair.

Just for the record it was my intention to grow it until Valentine’s Day, which was about three months from when I decided to grow it longer. When Valentine’s day came, my hair was technically longer however not that much longer.

One of my nephews was getting married at the end of June. Linda encouraged me to get my hair cut prior to his wedding. Growing out your hair is technically a personal decision. However, it has been my experience that doing stuff in consultation with your spouse is a good practical choice to make.

I happened to look back at some old pictures. Up until I graduated from high school I had short to medium length hair. One year after high school graduation, the pictures showed it was like four inches long. By my college graduation, my hair was maybe six inches long. My side burns were down to the bottom of my ears.

Then about two months before we got married in September 1974, I got it cut relatively short. For the next fifty years, pictures show, my hair is an inch or so long. In the past five years it has been really short.

Looking back, I was so used to having short hair, I didn’t realize that I had really short hair. Now that my hair is longer and styled it looks like normal length hair, just longer than it used to be.

I like it longer, I get compliments on my hair. The thing is my hair is only about three inches long. Which is not actually that long. It’s just like two and a half inches longer than it was.

This story starts with me having just turned 73. I’m doing well. I’m feeling good. No guarantees but a bunch of doctors have run a bunch of tests and as near as they can tell my body is well.

My brain and I had a discussion about what we can do to quietly celebrate having survived a rough several years. We decided whatever we did it needed to be both obvious if you knew and easily missed if you didn’t know.

Growing my hair longer was intentional. Yes, growing my hair longer is very significant to me. For the record, to me, growing my hair longer is not really about the length of my hair.

Growing my hair longer was / is a symbolic act. When I look in the mirror, seeing my longer hair is a reminder to myself that, yes it’s been a challenging several years, however I need to remember to live a good life, smile and thank my lucky stars that I’m alive and well.

I’m really enjoying going for long walks, continuing the quest to visit all of the state parks. For the record, I’m being very careful not to walk under any pianos suspended over the sidewalk.

The closer you look the more you see.