My Own, Personal Abishag

The shortened days of Winter have been scientifically proven to change your mood, not usually for the better. Today I stood in the long shadows, trying to pull the last, frail ray of heat from the setting sun. I pretended if I got in just the right sun beam, I'd warm up a few degrees. Alas, a childish game.

So I stood in the dying Winter sun, drew the toxic smoke from my pipe, and thought of David. I don't know why, but David came to mind...King David...you know, the dead dude from the Old Testament. David's life was anything but boring. He killed a lion. He killed Goliath. He out-witted Saul. He became king of Israel. The only thought I had of David was one lonely line from 1Kings 1:1 where, in the most poetical King James Version, it says, "he gat no heat." The full verse is "Now king David was old [and] stricken in years; and they covered him with clothes, but he gat no heat."

You see, no matter what great things David had accomplished in his life, he succumbed to the ravages of old age like any other man. There was nothing special about David. He had circulatory problems. He got old. He died.

Oh, before you feel sad for David, the solution his court came up with to keep him warm was to find a young maiden to lie next to him. Ironically, her name was Abishag. I say ironically because verse 4 tells us, "...but the king knew her not." No shagging there. Just simple body heat transfer.

So there I stood in the dying sun thinking, "he gat no heat." I couldn't stretch a fraction of a BTU out of old Sol. I couldn't gat me no heat either. So I rocked from one foot to the other, finished my bowl, and went some place warmer. I'm getting older. You see, I'm a birth-survivor and that's what happens to us birth-survivors; we get old. I never killed a lion or a giant. I'm king in only a small plot of land in a small sub-division. One day I'll deal with my days getting shorter just like this time of the year. My sun will set and I will gat no heat. I'm just thankful for central heating. I don't think my wife would allow me my own, personal Abishag.