To me, and to a lot of people, September/Labour Day is like the New Year, only more so. It's a beginning, dating back to the first day of school, and throughout the school career, the back-to-the-books feeling. New beginnings, new routine, new resolutions. So I wish you a productive new year, starting now. But I can't dwell on it now because I'm up to number 9 on the list of things predicted to disappear in my/our lifetime. Things. Right, things, But the list I read considers things to be cultural things, not things like spoons or pillows or furniture or gadgets or tschotschkes. My spell-chek tells me I spelled that wrong. I can't stop now because my battery is running low. What an excuse! Very thing-y. The idea of this prediction is that we don't own the things we have, things like books or music or movies or documents (files, papers, reports, news) because they're all delivered to us electronically, hence evanescent; iCloud wasn't named on a whim. I've already mentioned how attached I am to books, how the presence of them in my home comforts me with their vibes. I don't feel that way about the e-books locked in my reader. Recently I've been going through a lot of the books I own, looking for my seed-beds, tiny germs waiting to be fertilized and grow with me into a book of my own, that is, a new one that I will write. I derive a great deal of pleasure in coming across my own snail-trail across books I've read, with the notes and comments in the margins and the post-it notes studding the pages. I OWN those books. They will disappear, of course, eventually, when I lose the power to read and study them. I use the word power advisedly because I am now running on reserve battery power and must sign off, until tomorrow. Happy New Year.

When television was first projected to an eager public, people wondered what they looked at in their radio days. By now, everyone knows that radio is a visual medium and that people saw it in their mind's eye. Go back a bit; when sound came in they wondered what was going to happen to movies and then television seemed to threaten movies as well. Things disappear, evolve, change. When recording began, I think there were cylinders to play the sound back. I think I saw one in my grandparents' attic. Then there were big, thick disks with music on one side, then slimmer records with two sides of sound played at 78 rpm, then smaller ones at 45 rpm and more efficient ones at 33 1/3. Vinyl, they called it and vinyl is supposed to be making a comeback for aficionados. Does anyone remember the 8-track, fighting a losing battle with audio tapes? And now where are the tapes and tape decks and all that stuff? I guess I should have gone into this yesterday, considering the disappearance of music, but today the disappearing "fact" of life is television, or so they say, so it's all related, isn't it? We keep on filling our lives with sounds and pictures, refining and improving (?) and increasing our consumption, all the while mourning the death/disappearance of the previous tools of delivery. Television has not disappeared for the older generation, like me. I haven't gone so far as a wall-size screen but I like to watch a screen that's bigger than my face. I've already told you how I feel about buds stuck in my ears. Younger people use different devices to get their story (and music) fixes, but they're still watching, and listening. It surprised me when I first heard a grandchild singing along with to-her-familiar words to a hit song. I could scarcely recognize the words, let alone repeat them. Since that discovery I have learned to listen more closely, but only if I have to. (I had to review John Samson's lyrics as poetry. It took a while; I was on a new learning curve. If you're asking who's John Samson, look up the Weaker Thans.) Anyway, at this point I cannot afford the time, money or energy to pursue the knowledge further. Time and I are finite. I guess television is, too.