This day is almost over, without a blog Busy, though. And thinking. Tomorrow morning will come so soon it's hardly worth writing a blog right now.

How was your day? Have you reached the stage where everything you encounter during the day becomes part of an obstacle course? Either it's "clean me, feed me or toss me" or it's a reminder of something in your past that leads to something else. Is that clear? I think so. Pick any object and it carries with it a long vapour trail of memory, often quite messy and hard to get rid of. Proust's "essence des choses" was simple compared tho this.

I took the elevator this morning, as I do every day of course, and I thought of Winnie, the elevator operator in the office building in Winnipeg where my father worked. She wore a uniform and white gloves and had very thin, no-colour hair. I was just a kid and she was always nice to me. She ran the elevator pushing a lever around a circular dial and I guess she had to manoeuvre it so the floor level of the elevator matched the floor level it stopped at. That must have been why she wore gloves. And that's all I know about that. The gloves led me to another memory connected with someone else.

I'm not sure blogs are good for one. They lead to too much clutter. And more to come.

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.