I turned 60 this week.
If you would have told me when I was 16 or 21 or 30 that I'd reach this age, I never would have believed you. Nor that I would be happily married still with 3 kids. Or that we would have something called "The Internet" that I would spend so much time on...
Feeling prettty good about it, in decent health and feeling like I won some kind of lottery by surviving. 60 seems like a momentuous date because we have 10 fingers, if we had 8 it wouldn't be that big a deal, I guess.
On my birthday, I visited this tiny ancient church in London, just off the Strand in the financial district near the Tower of London - the St. Olave Hart Street Church, on Seething Lane. It was built in 1044 A.D. (which makes my mere 6 decades of life seem a lot less impressive) on the site of the Battle of London Bridge. There is a well down in the crypt of the church around which King (later Saint) Olaf II of Norway gathered his troops for a pre-battle pep talk before leading them in support of the forces of wonderfully titled British King Ethelred the Unready in driving the Vikings out of London, yelling, "Forward, Cross-Men!"
Many of Queen Elizabeth's cadre of spies and assassins worshipped and were buried here after the Protestants took it over, as well as the woman who was the model of Mother Goose, and the woman who brought the Bubonic Plague to London. Also buried here in the tiny littlle courtyard and crypt are hundreds of plague victims, buried on top of each other. The great English diarist Samuel Pepys and his colleagues in the Navy Office worshipped here (as do many still). The roof was blown out by the Germans in the Battle of Britain, but it was later rebuilt. There is a small meditation maze, which one may walk while contemplating the symbol of Christ in the center:
The entrance to the churrch is surmounted by carved skulls, and the Latin motto: "Christ lives - My reward is death".
Charles Dickens, a man who knew his way around a ghost story, loved the morbidity of the church and the design of the gate (erected in 1658, just before the 2nd plague hit London) so much that on foggy nights, he would have a cab drop him off in front so he could stand and admire the gate and motto by the light of a distant gas-lamp. He nicknamed the church "St. Ghastlty Grim", which it is still sometimes lovingly called by the small group of worshipers who gather there.
Not a bad place to go on one's birthday - kind of places the shortness of your own lifespan, and the many billions of who have gone before and will go afterwards, in perspective.
Anyway, I've been posting on MMA-TV for over a third of that life, since it was known as submissionfighting.com which seems astonishing but has been a fun way to waste time enjoyably and I thank you, one and all.
Anyone else older than me posting here?
