When our daughter Natalie requested that I be put on the prayer list at her church not long ago, some of her friends wanted to know if I had health problems.
Natalie assured them that my health was fine. She explained that Regina was going to Mexico for a few days to deliver Operation Christmas Child boxes and that I don’t do well by myself.
I think Natalie later got her mother and other church folks making the mission trip to Mexico on the prayer list, and she’s right that I need all the prayers I can get when I’m left alone.
It would be easy to blame my problem on new technology. I leave television sets on all over the house when Regina’s gone, because I have not figured out how to work all those remotes.
If the electricity goes off or just stalls for a few seconds, all the clocks, timers and other electronic devices that start blinking are still flashing when she gets home.
Being alone has bothered me all my life. My brother still reminds me of all those times he had to sit in the bathroom with me while I was bathing because I didn’t want to be by myself.
He says I always told him there was something important we needed to talk about. Then we would discuss the western movies we saw that weekend and how the Yankees were doing.
My sons made a lot of trips with me to stores and other places when they were growing up because I talked them into going. They soon discovered that I just needed somebody to talk to.
Now my grandchildren have figured that out, and it’s getting harder to convince them to hang out with me.
If there is any consolation in this distress about being alone, it is that there are apparently a lot of other people in the same boat.
Jack Clayton, the head football coach at Northwestern when I was a student trainer, would do anything to get some of us to go with him on scouting and recruiting trips.
I went on many of those expeditions to high schools across Louisiana and Texas, and he always delivered on his promise to get us hamburgers and milkshakes on the way back home.
He also agreed to help us with homework if we would keep him company on the road. That was beneficial to me because he was good at math and I didn’t understand the first thing about it.
Coach Clayton said he had worked earlier in his career for the legendary coach Ed Diddle at Western Kentucky and that Diddle had an even harder time being by himself than Clayton did.
Clayton said Mr. Diddle, as he called him, asked him to come to his office one morning to discuss an urgent issue.
After watching the old coach shuffle papers and go through files and folders for a half-hour, Clayton said, “Mr. Diddle, what is it you wanted to talk about?”
Diddle said, “Dammit, Jack, if you can’t think of anything to talk about, just get your butt out of here.”
I also had a great uncle who hated being alone. When he retired as a railroad conductor, he missed people he worked with over the years. So he turned his big home into a boarding house and was surrounded for the rest of his life by passenger train folks.
Those of us who don’t like to be alone get teased about it, but all kinds of research is showing now that loneliness can be detrimental to our physical and mental health.
One study concluded that being lonely is as much a factor in early mortality as smoking nearly a pack of cigarettes a day or the daily consumption of more than six alcoholic beverages.
I sent information on that research to my brother hoping that it might generate some feelings of guilt about his resentment of sitting with me in the bathroom when I needed companionship.
The findings in these scientific studies of being alone should also provide some justification for Natalie putting me on her church’s prayer list for staying by myself while Regina is on a mission trip.
I’m just not sure she should have put me on the list ahead of folks who are traveling to another country for such a good cause.
REPRINTED FROM THE NATCHITOCHES TIMES