Walking Through the Years

Written By Jonathan Krogh

Dear Fellow Time Travelers:

On the eve of turning 65, I believe I’m a bit younger than I thought I would be at this age. On the other hand, I remember my dad saying that when he was a kid, he wondered why old people walked the way they did. Then he got older and found out your gait shifts because things hurt. I think about that every time I see a video of me walking—I shift from side to side like an elderly penguin. Sometimes on my longer walks I try to refine my stride to appear younger, shifting my hunching back upward, attempting to recall the full six-foot measure recorded on my driver’s license.

A decade or so ago, when I moved into my current office, I carried every one of those books up the stairs myself. All lined up by category and author, most of them only offering justification for the shelves underneath. At some unknown date in the future, I’ll need to carry them all back down; it will take more trips because they’ll need to be in smaller boxes. Every pastor’s office has bookshelves, and every minister feels an obligation to fill them. It gives the room gravitas, like footnotes supporting the diplomas and ordination certificate affixed to the wall left without bookshelves. Old hymnals fill a couple of shelves; people give their pastors old hymnals when they find them while liquidating a relative’s estate or prior to a move toward better weather. Old Bibles too, their leather bindings dropping a bit of powder wherever they’ve been placed. They appear to have value but they don’t, despite their ornate bindings and yellowing brittle pages, with woodcuts illustrating prophetic ecstasy or a smiling child on the lap of the Savior. It’s hard to toss out a Bible, even when it may never be opened again. It doesn’t feel right when a Bible is staring up at you from the recycling bin. Just drop it off at church—they’ll know what to do with it… No, we don’t.

I’m old enough to have known people who didn’t have birth certificates. Born in the country, offspring of hired hands on some farm or plantation, filing paperwork with the county office didn’t make a new human being more or less confirmable. But much later, after decades of paying into Social Security, the bureaucrats need confirmation of age, so that a broken-down laborer won’t scam the system by collecting retirement a few months too early. That’s what those big, lined pages in the center of the Family Bible were for. Sometimes they were off-center, between the Old and New Testaments, but usually they were stitched somewhere in the Psalms. A baby was born, and the circuit-riding preacher came to town to catch up on baptisms or baby dedications, depending on the tradition, occasionally performing a wedding or offering prayer at the graveside of one who perished between visits. Sometimes the recorded date of birth was just a best-guess by family. Onlookers recalling it was a Tuesday and definitely September, the preacher became the recorder and picked from the four possible options, usually nudged to late or early in the month based on recollections of when life began. That document creased into the pages of the big Bible could be copied and then rushed off to the Piggly Wiggly where they had a zip machine (fax). I’ve had long conversations with disbelieving HR clerks explaining that it was the only paperwork validating a human’s age, all so that checks could begin. Our church’s baptismal records still hold the same legal value, but with county offices being a bit less discriminating and birth seldom happening on kitchen tables anymore, they are seldom requested, except when one of our long-ago members needs justifying paperwork because they’re marrying a Catholic.

Tomorrow I’ll be officially old, although at some point when I wasn’t looking, that marker shifted to age 67. But video does not lie—I walk funny—so today I figured I should practice musing like an old guy. Maybe tomorrow I’ll finish resetting the clocks; until then and beyond, I remain,

With Love,
Jonathan Krogh
Your Pastor

Jonathan Krogh
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