Well, it is cold here and maybe where you are, too, but when I wrote my title, of course the tune came attached to it. Did you hum it, too? Can you remember when you first heard it? That set me to pondering. A while ago now I wrote down a few things that tipped others off to how old I am, like knowing all the words to the MuZak pumped into elevators and stores. It's worse than that now: I don't know the words any more. The songs are younger than I am. There are other indications of increasing age, more serious than that. I'm outliving my doctors. Happy and fortunate are those physicians who have lived to retire. But several have died, gone to that big examining room in the sky, and I'm still here, looking for a new doctor to prop me up and keep me going. I was going to say "man", but my new doctor is female. Nice.

What else? At some point in life, in a woman's life, anyway, it seemed desirable not to give away one's age. I was carefully taught by an older mentor not to remember the names of movie stars past their prime. "Learn to look wide-eyed," she said, "as you ask 'Who's Ronald Colman?" As if anyone remembers him any more. Try Harrison Ford. Oh, there are so many names of new young hunks that I'm never going to remember. Mind you, I don't think many of them are that hunky. Tastes change with age - and discrimination?

Here's another sign of advancing age: the presents you receive at Christmas and other festive times. I am collecting a whole drawer full of shawls and scarves. They're pretty and soft and warm and I do use them but usually no more than two at a time (this week, maybe more because i'm cold). At that, I'm better off than an aging aunt whose drawers I had to empty when she died. She had unused nightgowns, too decorative to be warm, and stale cologne and far too many bars of French soap. One of the nicest gifts I have received lately was a stove, a World Vision stove to enable a woman in a refugee camp in Africa to burn available fuel rather than go outside the camp to forage for some kind of wood and get raped.

There are ways to keep one's heart warm and young.

Hey,I just had a built-in editor!

I was getting bogged down in an idea I was trying to work my way out of when Safari suddenly quit on me and left me with nothing but the title of this post . So I can start again, more cleanly. I still want to make my point, that we are so bombarded with too much raw, undigested information that we don't have or take the time to process and assimilate. I am revising my NY resolutions and making them negative.

Uppermost is this one: Do NOT BUY so much.

Food and books, for starters. I have a fridge and freezer bull of food and bookshelves full of books, a lot of it waiting to be consumed. So start consuming. Well, I do, have, am - consuming all the time and I complain that i don't have enough time. But if I didn't have so much stuff, so much backlog, then I would gradually have more time, wouldn't I? I might also have some thoughts about what i've been taking in so thoughtlessly.

I wasn't always like this. Either i was swifter (probably) or I was doing less in the way of back-up. I think that's true, too, because I had less stuff to back up. It takes a long time to accumulate all the stuff I have and it takes more and more time to sort it all out. Half a century ago, literally, I thought my life would be complete, and organized, if I could just file some of the stuff I was collecting. I couldn't afford a filing cabinet but I found a Carnation Milk cardboard carton exactly the right size to hold file folders. Wow. I have genuine steel filing cabinets now but I'm still scrounging cardboard boxes to hold more files. I'm spending the weekend on files, trying to organize all my clippings and stray thoughts and random ideas. I know I know I know what you're going to tell me. Put it in the computer. I've tried DOO and EVERNOTE and I think there's one called SKITCH (?) but my mind is too linear, I guess, and besides, I love to handle and mark up paper. Hey, where would the paperclip industry be without paper? I'm supporting an endangered species. I don't mind if staples disappear because they're hell on fingernails to remove. But paperclips moor and tether and gather and corral oh, and tidy my bits and pieces.

How did I get on to paperclips when all I want to say is how important it is to stop the accumulation before it's too late?