Many years ago when I was middle aged, I had an extraordinary colleague and friend.
An Egyptian highly trained in England, my friend was an immiscible hash of Egyptian and English élan and academia, plus a whopping dose of Near Eastern inscrutability and of Mid-Western American opportunism.
Also, he was the professor of pathology at a med school at which I taught. Under an ethnically hooked nose loomed a frightfully smiling mouth chockful of exceedingly large, gleaming teeth, from which would come his all-purpose, shouted response to whatever I’d said, whether a conversational quip or 3-hr lecture on renal pathology, “Wes, … that’s …YOOOOOU!”
I must have heard him ejaculate that “YOU!” a thousand times but was never prepared and always nonplused. Was he being profoundly ontological, or Freudian? Virtuoso one-upmanship in a Levantine garden of schmooze? All of the above? Or, more likely, just simply as hopelessly cryptic as the Sphinx, and he was just being HIM.
That settled, his YOU! hasn’t gone away. Even after over 40 years, my mind is still stuck on it. But now I think of his YOU! as a universally applicable way of labeling the essence of a person.
Delilah
Take Delilah, seen before as a blonde and then a brunette, for the nonce a redhead. Whether color dyes or wigs, it’s HER! Her changeability is so … HER!
Delilah’s hair color is dependably delightfully undependable, but everybody changes vastly in every way and not just by whim or caprice, or deep choice, but also involuntarily if imperceptibly. Age does it, the flow of age, as relentless and inevitable as a glacier. Eventually Delilah’s hair will be undeniably gray, if she cares.
Presented either as a “funny” but disgusting greeting card, a wise Facebook meme, a cleverly worded paragraph, or a grim diagnosis by your doctor, aging affects every part and function of the body, in old age adversely even unbearably. At different ages a person is different to the core. You are not the same guy hiding behind different masks, makeup, or wigs. Such a moving target, it’s tough to “find yourself.”
We nonagenarians – now I’m one - know more than we ever thought possible about how we change. Come night, and whereas in our youth we would sleep like a rock, we now toss and turn all night, neither asleep nor awake but in some unyielding, unreal but vaguely awful state, and all the next day sleeping it off.
We know fearfulness of heights and dangers in the streets; and that the almond tree blossoms white; and the grasshopper drags itself along, and desire can no longer be stirred, and the drivers license is denied. Then a man goeth to his place below, and mourners go about in the streets. And the dust returneth to the earth.
And we men don’t know the half of the change our women experience not so pleasantly every month, or half a life along.
Over the accumulating years, standing with decreasing erectness at my mirror, the source of our most available image of ourselves if exactly a mirror image, I have smiled at my new erect biceps or frowned at my sagging platysma now more bulky than my biceps, while my memory has gone from magnetic to sieve, and I have advanced from speeding tickets to handicapped parking.
TV commercials show probably-artificially-gray finely coifed senior couples in slow-motion gracefully waltzing. Watch genuinely gray-haired, balding me wrench myself up out of a chair and it’s more like a rusty ratchet wrench in real-time stop motion, frozen in mid-twist, with amped-up sound effects and groans.
I’m a different person in my 90s than I was at 9. Metamorphosis and transmogrification, from wet larva to wizened husk. Always in identity crisis, not merely at midlife, I suspect my identity at age 16 was stolen along with my Vienna Boys Choir soprano voice, identity theft continues every time I turned around, and alas no fraud number to call.
Hello! Hello! Is that you? Maybe – depends on which me you want. Which YOU was my Egyptian addressing? It would have been my middle-aged me. That’s not ME now.
At the beginning before sin there was the tree of life and no aging. And no need for a woman to undergo a hair color change.
God had forewarned Adam that sin would bring death on the very day of the sinning. Adam chose to sin anyway.
By sinning, Adam surrendered himself to Satan and consigned us all, all mankind, us, me, you, to be his lawful captives. As our ringmaster, trainer, owner-handler, puppeteer, Satan commands us and then speaks for us, like Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. “You’re so …. MEEE!”
This is me, a very old man (O that it were me in my youth), on my knees accepting Christ’s offer, entreating God to take me now, finally, as wholly His, imploring that He pry me loose from Satan’s iron grasp. I was born 4th generation SDA but never born again. Now I’m pleading to be reborn, even if by breech delivery. If, “if a man be in Christ he is a new creature. The old things are passed away. All things are become new” (2 Cor 5:17.
Not only must a man be born again but he must grow up and bear fruit, become mature. The things we once loved we now hate; the things once hated are now loved. I am now HIS.
But what’s that I hear? It’s that old voice bellowing, “You, you on your knees, that’s NOT you! You’re still my own Godless YOOOOU. You’re not YOU, you’re MEEEE. Get up from your knees and go back to your old life and take a nap.”
I’m not the ME Satan has known. I do not get off my knees.
This divine reversal of all sin-imposed physical and spiritual changeability is the unmerited, loving result of Christ’s infinite sacrifice of Himself in becoming one of us.
But the divine contingency plan is optional, contingent upon our freely choosing to accept it, deeply, wholly. We must lose ourselves in HIM. YOU must become HIM.
Back to my Egyptian colleague. “That’s YOU!” was but one of a pair of his exotic oracles. Talking to me, it would be a grinning YOU. Talking to me about somebody else, the inscrutable professor might indulge the prehistoric ethnic multipurpose ceremony that for the past couple of millennia has meant only consummate contempt, such as Christ suffered. Frowning like Pharaoh after Moses’s latest plague, my Egyptian is hissing, “I spit in his face.”
Though Satan disowns us on our knees and spits on us, no need to reach for the Kleenex. Like the extra water Elijah poured on the altar and into the surrounding moats was consumed by fire from heaven, mere spit, along with tears and death, will be consumed in the lake of fire. The rebuke of His people He shall take away from off the land. Then, of Satan it shall be said, “he’s so GONE.”
Dr. Kime was born in 1929, in Los Angeles, California.
Kime pursued dual careers in art (since childhood) and medicine (physician; specialties in internal medicine and pathology; clinical and academic). He studied the principles of art, chemistry of paint, and the works of master artists as assiduously as medicine. After retiring from pathology at Kettering Medical Center in 1994, Dr. Kime has concentrated on his art, producing portraits, seascapes and figural work mainly in oils, and urbanscapes predominantly in watercolor. Dr. Kime currently lives in Redlands, CA.