It’s never too late to be polite and once you’ve gone that far you may as well be friendly. I come from Scots and Yorkshiremen who were suspicious by nature and brought up judgmental and were happiest when alone in a stone hut working with wood but I’ve adopted the “Never too late” point of view after I called up a relative whom I’d avoided for fifty years because she’d said mean things about me and she was so happy to hear my voice that I reformed and became a Christian again. I’ve come to the Lord hundreds of times and it’s always a pleasure. I’ve said it before: life is good, never mind what the cranky and anxious may say, and that’s why so many of us elders are overstaying our welcome, snarfling up Medicare and Social Security, clogging the highways, standing confused at self-checkout trying to figure out how it works. We like it here.

Now of my three score years and ten,
Eighty-one won’t come again.
Subtract from seventy eighty-one,
It means my account is overdrawn,
Which makes me privileged to be
Surviving into bankruptcy.
I’m avoiding sickness and injury
And plan to live an entire century.

There’s plenty of reason for anxiety but think back to the Romans and the B.C. era and imagine how they felt with the year numbers declining annually and you come to 11 B.C. and then 10 and 9 and it’s like a countdown to disaster. Will you wind up at zero? Will the world cease to exist? Nobody knew.