I'm going to learn Icelandic today. (I might have the wrong declension on the word Icelandic.)

All day.

I have so many things going on, I have been neglecting my homework. Yeah yeah I've been busy. That's everyone's excuse now and it's true and valid and justified - all that. But it's also a matter of choice. There are so many projects and commitments and pleasures vying for attention that it's all too easy to choose only one or two and let the others slide. When guilt or shame outweighs pleasure, it's time to come to terms with one's commitment. So today I choose Icelandic.

I was talking to my granddaughters the other day, both gifted young women (I told you that already), and they were discussing their travel adventures and their efforts to learn other languages. One of them, who spent a couple of summers in Africa setting up outpost clinics for children (as an undergrad medical student), learned Swahili. She climbed Mount Kilimanjaro before she went home one year and was so fluent that she managed to complain about her physical aches in Swahili. She said to her guide that even her little finger was sore. And the other one, the artist, a product of French immersion in her Toronto schooling, and of a mother (my daughter) who spoke French to her at home and took her to Montreal to practice, described the day, after she had spent several months in Europe, when "the veil dropped" and she was understanding and thinking in French. Wow.

Well, I studied Latin and Classical Greek at university (so I have a very large vocabulary and a good grasp of grammar) and I took a double honours degree in French and English. I was almost bilingual, though I never had a veil drop, maybe once when I'd had too much wine. So what am I doing, studying Icelandic? I am so sorry I didn't learn it when I was a child, listening to but not understanding my mother and her mother and sisters gossiping over coffee. It would be so easy now, I can tell, even from the few remnants that my grandmother taught me; i can pronounce the word for bread exquisitely.

The trees outside my window are laden with snow. It's a lovely day to stay inside and study. So blessed!

I think I told you that I decided I have to write another, new chapter for my aging book. So I started to do some peripheral reading to jog my anecdotal memory. (My book is not a documentary, it's a collection of thoughts.) Anyway, of course, and so....more thinking.

I am so arrogant, so blessed, so smug, so fortunate, so complacent, as if I had anything to do with my good genes and good health. Yes, I try to take good care of myself, but I am not making a bid for immortality, I'm just trying to live well in whatever time ls granted to me. Anything can happen, and usually does. Don't presume, don't assume.

The "good death" is often attributed to a good palliative care unit doing its job. In the olden days a good death occurred at the bedside of the dying patriarch who asks if everyone is present and runs down the names of his family, being assured that they are all indeed, there. And he asks, "So who's minding the store?" Another so-called good death, desired by men, is to be shot at the age of 92 by a jealous husband. A more peaceful end is envisaged by women: to die quietly on a birthday, again surrounded by the loving family. I actually know someone who went that way, well, I didn't know her, I knew one of her sons who was present at her 97th birthday party when she passed (as they say), surrounded, etc. She was a living - dying - myth and all too rare. Instead, we get the common, garden-variety, undignified , and very expensive fall into Alzheimer's and Parkinson's and other nasty failures. Who's to say who will be exempt?

Not me. All I can say is, "I'm still here."

And may the Lord be thankit.

Until tomorrow?