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At first it doesn't feel as though anything were being lost. Whatever you had to begin with is still there and working as well as it ever did, probably better. It's just that you wake up one morning and realize that something has shifted. It's that glorious feeling you've had from childhood that if you just dream the right dreams and work hard enough - anything is possible! Do you remember feeling like that? Until the realization comes that there aren't that many possibilities left. This is pretty much it, and "it" bears very little resemblance to the way you planned it. When that day came for Madeleine L'Engle she wrote a poem and called it ACT III, Scene II:

Someone has altered the script.
My lines have been changed.
The other actors are shifting roles.
They don't come on when they're expected to,
and they don't say the lines I've written
and I'm being upstaged.
I thought I was writing this play
with a rather nice role for myself,
small, but juicy
and some excellent lines.
But nobody gives me my cues
and the scenery has been replaced
and I don't recognize the new sets.
This isn't the script I was writing.
I don't understand this play at all.

To grow up
is to find
the small part you are playing
written by
someone else.

That's a wise conclusion, but not a simple one. Living well is not only the best revenge, it's an art. One doesn't arrive at a serene and fulfilling old age that is the Crown of Life the poets talk about by simply continuing to breathe in and out. There are choices to be made, attitudes of mind and heart to be cultivated or rejected. There are commitments to be made, adventures of the spirit to be undertaken. And it's never too early to begin – or too late.

Traits of character and personality evolve through a continuing process over the course of one's life; they don't just zap into place at birth or at 21 or 65 or any other milestone. Actually, people are a lot like cheese or wine: Who and what we are in old age is pretty much a distilled essence of what we've been becoming through all our years. One of the things we tend to lose as we age is our ability and even our will to dissemble, to cover up with our repertoire of masks. There we are, for all to see. Experts say that in a curious way this is even true of some Alzheimer's victims.

Of course, this isn't entirely a boot-strap operation. I am also the product of my environment. As my inevitable diminishment proceeds I become increasingly vulnerable, and responsive to the human ecology that either nurtures or erodes my being.....Which is why I want to tell you about my friend, the Quagga.

Now it might strike you as odd that I would refer to the Quagga as my friend. One might assume that we didn't have too much in common – considering that the Quagga was a four-footed beast that became extinct more than 100 years ago. But you never know where you're going to discover a sympathetic chord.

These lovely creatures were of the family Equus, kin to both the zebra and the horse. They galloped in herds over the grassy steppes of southern Africa and it must have been an extraordinary thing to see them come thundering over the horizon! The head, neck and forequarters looked like any zebra you might meet, but from the center of the back through the hindquarters the coat was a beautiful unmarked golden brown. like a buckskin pony from out the American West. And then the whole thing was topped off by a jet black tail! It was conceived, I have no doubt, when the Creator was in one of his more whimsical moods.

But unfortunately for the Quagga, the species homo sapiens was not content to simply observe such an unlikely wonder romping about. No, they had to possess that amazing coat. And so it came to pass that the last of the Quaggas, a female, died in an Amsterdam Zoo in 1883. How very lonely she must have been.

But there's more to the story. A few years ago an incredible thing happened. A group of scientists at the University of California at Berkeley succeeded in extracting and reproducing – cloning – DNA material from fossil remains of the Quagga! Well now, that's pretty exciting stuff, and I'm sure the fields of molecular biology and evolutionary studies have taken giant strides as a result. But it scares me, too.

You see, I keep having this image of white-coated figures in a laboratory peering through their microscopes at the cloned cells. And then their leader says, "What we have here, ladies and gentlemen, is the essence of Quagga."

No sir, you do not! Those cells tell you nothing about the creature's spirit, or his temperament, or courage or fears or the way it nurtured and taught its young, or the dreams it dreamed, or a thousand other things. They tell you very little about the Essence of Quagga!

And I have the same kind of chill when I hear more and more definitive statements about what old people are like, what their needs are, where and how they should live, the sexual practices they can be expected to follow, et cetera, et cetera.

Don't misunderstand me. We need theoreticians and statisticians at many levels and their contributions are often invaluable. It's just that when the time comes that I need to be ministered to, cared for, I pray that those to whom I am entrusted will not be overly influenced by the latest findings regarding the average Caucasian female of such and such an advanced age. I would remind the world at large that both the Quagga and I are highly individuated specimens of our kind!

Another child in that creative writing class I told you about wrote this: "The people have problems, such as starvation and shelter, and they might get squished." Oh yes! There are a lot of ways we can get squished. It happens all the time. Sometimes Life seems to reach out like a disembodied Force to flatten us. Sometimes we squish each other. And we even do it to ourselves. The fact that there is seldom any conscious malice involved makes it no less destructive. But you and I claim to be People of Faith – and that's supposed to make a difference in the way we look at things. It's supposed to say something pretty powerful about every human being's dignity and place in the Universe.

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