If it can be messed up, I will manage to do it.

I do not say that as a complaint. At this point in life, it is almost a skill set. Some people have hobbies, whereas I have field experience in things going sideways.

This morning started early. Not noble early, not inspirational early. Just one of those mornings where the body clock looks at the actual clock and says, “Well, we are awake now, so I suppose everybody needs to make peace with it.”

So I got up.

I made the early pass on the dome with the razor, then later followed it with the electric shaver to make sure I had not left any rough spots hiding. A little moisturizer went on afterward, because apparently even a bald head has maintenance requirements. The dentures went in, and those rascals behaved for the moment, though I never fully trust them.

I keep spare denture cream in my locker at work. This is older-man logistics. At this age, I am not carrying cologne to impress anybody, and I carry spare denture cream because these rascals may decide to stage a walkout without notice.

I am not chasing youth. Obviously that ship has sailed, and the best I can do is wave from the dock.

I am not trying to be thirty-five again. I am not trying to win some imaginary contest against the mirror. I am a man in his 60s making my way the best I can. Some mornings that means shaving my head, seating my dentures, finding the cardigan, and getting ready for church.

At church, I have become something like Mr. Rogers with a West Texas accent. I almost always wear a cardigan. Sometimes that cardigan stays with me. Sometimes some 60-plus-year-old saint forgets her sweater and starts fussing that she is cold.

What am I supposed to do, look over and say, “Well, it sucks to be you”?

No. You take off the cardigan and hand it over. Usually to the spouse.

Then you sit there pretending you are snug as a bug in a rug while your dentures are trying not to chatter out the bass line to the invitation song.

That is just another day, and that is what I am trying to explain.

When I say “just another day,” I do not mean life has been easy. I mean life has been so full of fire, mud, grease, medical charts, bad timing, and grace that I have stopped being surprised by the shape of trouble.

If I were reading my own life instead of having lived it, I might think this ol’ boy was making half of it up.

It sounds like too much because it was too much, but too much still happened.

There was a time when our mobile home caught fire.

Christina was pregnant. Phalon was maybe twenty months old. We were young, tired, stretched thin, and already living the kind of life where you learned to do whatever had to be done.

When the fire started, I tried to put it out with a blanket because that is what I had seen on television. Television, as it turns out, leaves out some useful information. For example, it does not lean into the camera and say, “Do not use an eighty-year-old antique quilt.”

Yep, I used an eighty-year-old antique quilt. It burst into flames and spread fire all over the place.

That is funny now, but only because everybody got out.

I lowered Christina out the window so she would not fall. Then I lowered Phalon out. Then I jumped out myself, right into the middle of a muddy cotton field.

There are moments in life where you do not have time to build a philosophy. You do the next thing. You lower your wife. You lower the baby. You jump. You land in the mud. You thank God later when your hands quit shaking.

That was one lesson.

There were others. Oh yeah, we ain’t done. Hang on.

In 1981, on Friday the 13th, atrial fibrillation made a dramatic entrance. I was stopped at a stop sign with a police officer behind me. The rhythm hit hard and fast. The officer later said I passed out, fell over in the seat, and my car rolled underneath a bread truck.

When I woke up, I was in the back seat. The front seat was gone, and people were looking for the driver, not realizing he had been thrown backward and was still inside the car.

Another time, I was lucky.

Later, atrial fibrillation stopped acting like an occasional guest star and decided it had joined the permanent cast. I was living on caffeine, little sleep, night work, and whatever grit I could scrape off the floor. I was trying to build a career, raise a family, work second jobs, and keep going while my own electrical system was throwing sparks behind the dashboard.

Somewhere around 1986 or 1987, Christina and I started to get it together, not easy together, and not polished together. Just enough together that the wheels finally seemed to point mostly in the same direction.

I was working nights by then. I cannot remember if I was doing sleep studies, EEGs, or standing in the doorway of what would become cardiology, but I was in that world. The shape of a career was starting to show up, and at the same time, life was not waiting politely for us to catch our breath.

We had another baby on the way.

That was marriage in those days: one foot in the hospital, one foot in the house, and both of us trying not to drop anything important.

Christina and I were never very good at fitting stereotypes. Early in our marriage, I filled in as a ward clerk, what they now call a unit secretary, while she was out mowing lawns and painting houses. I set hot rollers. She replaced an alternator. We were not trying to make a point, we were just trying to make it through the week.

I can remember coming home from my second job washing dishes. I had been procrastinating on replacing the alternator in our car. I knew it needed doing, hey I intended to do it. I just kept doing other things.

That day I came home and found Christina literally sitting on the motor of the car. My mother was standing there too, like a witness to a small domestic revolution. To her credit, Christina had replaced the alternator. That was the day I learned “I’ll get to it” has an expiration date.

I did my share of vehicle work too. Once I climbed under the car to replace the starter. I got it done on the first attempt, which sounds better than it felt. At one point, I dropped the starter on my face. No, I did not say bad words, but I thought them with great enthusiasm.

Sometimes a man’s restraint is not measured by what happens to him, but by what he manages not to holler from under a car.

Then there was the hair.

At one time, I wanted to be a barber. Of course I did. I wanted to be and do everything. In high school I took some barber classes. In the early years of marriage, I permed, bleached, dyed, and styled Christina’s hair. Then daughters came along, life got busier, and around 1999 I announced my retirement from hair.

Semi-retirement, as it turns out.

Because there were days I could be outside mowing, covered in grass clippings and sweat, and Christina would call me into the house to set hot rollers and use mousse.

C’mon, y’all, do not tell the guys.

Then again, anybody who knows me will not be surprised. They will just laugh that I finally confessed what they already knew.

That is the stuff worth remembering.

Not because it was all pleasant. Some of it was terrifying. Some of it was hard. Some of it was ridiculous, but it was ours. It was the life we were trying to build, one odd repair, one second job, one baby, one bad decision with a quilt, one night shift, one prayer at a time.

For a long time, memories like that sat in the back shed. Survival does that. It stores things away and says, “Not now. We are busy staying upright.”

But now I am free to remember.

That freedom feels strange sometimes. I can sit in the quiet and think, good grief, how did I survive all this?

The car wreck. The fire. The arrhythmia. The long nights. The babies. The bills. The illness. The cancer. The bypass scars. The one lung. The things I remember and the things I am still learning how to remember.

I can name practical pieces of the story: timing, help, instinct, stubbornness, people who showed up, doctors, family, and luck, if you want to call it that.

But at the end of the list, I come back to God.

Not in a bumper-sticker way. Not as a tidy explanation for every painful thing. More like a man looking back over wreckage, fire, hospitals, mud, night shifts, and still somehow finding himself upright on a Sunday morning.

God.

That is the answer big enough to hold the whole thing.

These days, “The Rebuild” looks different than I once imagined. I am not chasing youth. I am not trying to impress anybody. Skinny jeans have never been an option and are not now. Sweatpants, however, remain a practical theological possibility.

I do not need to be young again, I just need to be present.

Sometimes being present means a little chair dancing with one earbud in, at work, at home, writing, a foot tap, or shoulder roll. A small disco grandpa moment while the words warm up or the night tries to turn me into furniture. Yeah, somebody may give me the side-eye.

Let them.

The side-eye burns no calories, but the movement just might keep me in the game.

Sometimes you must cut loose. Footloose, even. Maybe not across the whole floor, maybe just in a chair with the knees behaving themselves. But movement is movement, and joy counts too.

That is very Gen Jones, not Boomer swagger, just Gen Jones, thank you kindly.

Not that Gen X detachment.

Just old enough to remember rabbit ears on the television, young enough to know the side-eye can mind its business.

During The Rebuild, I did not really discharge everything from my life, a lot of things simply lost their usefulness.

Mayo gave way to Greek yogurt and nutritional yeast, and mustard still shows up when the plate needs a little bite. Turning up the heat in the morning became a cardigan or bathrobe. Sitting and waiting for the television became walking and a disco beat.

I did not have to hate the old habits. I just had to notice when they were no longer helping.

And I always come back to the fork.

I can never forget to pick up the fork, because that is where this started. Not with a speech, or with a perfect plan. Not with some grand announcement, just one ordinary tool in my hand and one decision in front of me.

Pick up the fork.

Take the step.

Do the part that is mine.

Some mornings I do not need a battle cry. I need light. A little music. A little movement. A reminder from John 1 that life does not begin with my effort. It begins with Him.

Then I take the step that is mine.

So am I down?

Not really.

I have been knocked around, been scared, and have been tired clear down into the floorboards. I have had enough life lessons to make a man wonder why he is not in a rubber room being hosed down every Friday whether he needs it or not.

But down is not the same as finished.

And I am not even sure down is the right word anymore.

This is just another day.

Another day to get up.

Another day to move a little.

Another day to laugh at what nearly broke me.

Another day to remember what God carried me through.

Another day to pick up the fork.

Another day to say, “I am still here.”