THE MINISTER: A SHORT STORY

An old man now, he was thin, remembering that he was not always so, was not always old, and was not always thin. It had to do, he said, with the drop in his testosterone level when he turned 50, or maybe 55, and with it a loss of his muscle mass, not that he had that much to lose, but he had a fair bit. Compared to most, he had a lot actually. What intrigued him was that he was not distressed by it, in contrast to when he was younger, when the absence of even one pound had him feverishly lifting more weights and eating a whole lot more food. It was, he said, as if he feared dying. As it happened, he WAS dying, had been dying from the day he was born, except that he only just now saw it.

I watched him pull up a picture of himself on his laptop, the same picture I had of him in my mind, a photo of him as a young man, with much shorter hair than the long gray locks he had these days. When he was a young man he wanted to be a minister. That was when his life got in the way. Now that his life was no longer in the way, he was becoming a minister.