Joe, camerado (that warm endearing address our great American bard Walt Whitman used to indicate a special kind of communal love: imagine my arm around Joe’s shoulders), I get it. I too have spent my 85 years getting up early and immediately engaging in meaningful socially responsible work even if only on my mini-version of your world stage.

In grade school I always carried the giant crucifix at the head of our giant ceremonial processions around town. I was The Man, I was Catholicism for a time, I spread the Word.

At 17, it was my responsibility to open up one of the most prestigious restaurants in Philadelphia at 5 a.m. every day, enabling the day’s deal-making of the Center City business, legal and political power brokers who gathered there over breakfast.

I was the youngest claim supervisor in the northeast quadrant of the third largest insurance company in the United States, dispensing healthcare to those in need.

I introduced a democratizing multi-cultural literature into the core curriculum of a prestigious university.

I chaired a department in that prestigious but tradition-bound university when significant class and gender issues needed to be confronted and resolved.

I was the Socretean gadfly to my local city government.

I was the first 80+ in their history to finish a large long-standing local half-marathon race.

I am a doer, camerado, just like you. I am still up early, always doing, still engaged, just in a different way, in a different sphere.

For instance, I’ve published regular letters not only here and in the Morning Call but in The Inquirer, the Times, The Post, and the Journal. I’m still meaningfully busy. My head’s still in the game.

But, as I told you last week, camerado, I lost Northampton recently. Couldn’t find it. And I’ve frozen in front of an ATM. And I doze off like clockwork every two hours, no matter the location or company.

It took me a while to reconcile compression stockings with shorts. And in several years, I haven’t passed a bathroom I didn’t intimately engage.

My wife has me on a tracker.

So I’ve moved on and been moved on. It looks like it’s time for you to move on, too, camerado. But you won’t basically change either. You will continue to be called on for your wit, your wiles, and your wisdom.

My back-then chronologically late-sleeping six “boys” remember me rousting them out of bed late mornings with an exasperated chant of “Get up, sluggards, this day is shot.”

That phrase will be inscribed on my tombstone. Not “May he rest in peace” but “this day is shot.”

I think you will move on like me with the same gusto, curiosity, anticipation, and impatience to applying your service and skill in the next mode of existence.

Ed