Before writing this bog (#4), some business
I'm still trying to refine the physical purity of this blog by having a comment section immediately following the text, as any self-respecting blog should have. But how to do that is elusive, although there are knowledgeable people helping me. Meantime, if you want to leave a comment, click on the title of the blog, and lo! a comment box will appear below the text.
And a somewhat hairier problem. (Hoarier problem? One easily falls into the morass of how something customary suddenly isn't customary.) That is, how to combine the emails of all the blog's recipients so that by pressing a single key, the blog speeds not faster than the speed of light to them.
If any readers have solutions to these for the moment conundrums, please let me know.
Now about aging.
It surprises me how many people are reluctant to give up their age to strangers. As though having been born is shameful, and best left undisclosed. In my view, becoming older signifies some sort of victory over the illnesses that strike without warning, or accident. All the contingencies that threaten growing older. To announce how old you are, it seems to me, is a way of saying that you have beaten the odds. But that's not in the mindset of many, especially women. For heaven's sake, when you're in your 70's you are hardly of sexual interest to any but a very small percentage of men. Why, then, the mystery? Habit, perhaps. Withholding your age was, at one time, among the women I knew growing up, just not done, and it was rude to ask unless, perhaps you were asked by a doctor or someone else whose detailed knowledge of you was useful or necessary.
Now after that homily, are there any dissenters? If so, I THINK I'd like to hear from you.
It may, or will, come as a surprise to some that this blog was expected to emphasize poetry. One of my daughters-in-law, herself a blogger, knowing of my penchant for having words chase each other across a page but not necessarily in any conventional sequence, encouraged me to embark on this late-time activity, thinking perhaps that it might keep the gray cells funcioning. Well, she has learned that I am no man's (or woman's) follower. She has, I hope, come to the knowledge that anything that means words will find its way on this computer.
I haven't forgotten that the blog has to do with aging, so here is a poem about what it means to me to age.
MY TIMES OF LIFE
Daily, earth diminishes, time lessens,
breaths count maybe in the millions,
the numbers that count my life
inevitably begin on their asymptote
to reach the straight line that means
an approaching end, asymptotes not
designed to rise forever when it comes
to life.
The mathematics of living are so
peculiar, nothing I think about
or really know, but all the same
the sands that spill are counting,
sometimes slowly sometimes quickly
but always enumerating time passed
therefore time left.
Euclid and Euler never bothered
with such things, so far as is known,
although they too were subject to
the enumerations of which they might
or might not have been aware.
Everything counts in life.
So there you have it. I have another poem about aging I want to send you, but that will have to wait until next time.
Until then, peace, and be as serene as you can.
