I was going to skip today because I was tired but I can't sleep so here I am, under the wire (it's 11:56),

I don’t mind waking in the wee small hours but I don’t like not going to sleep when I want to. I can usually control my thinking but not my feet and they’re cold. Can’t sleep with cold feet. So I get you instead, or you get me. How was your day?

I have to think about my day before I decide what to write about. I don’t want to talk about my leg or my screenplay. I’ve been dumping on you far too much. There is one topic I’ve been avoiding, trying to wait until The Day but I guess it’s close enough now and heaven knows, I’ve been thinking about it quite a lot.

I’m going to be 85 on Sunday, February 21.

There.

It’s sort of like the far side of the moon, when you come to think of it, except no one ever thinks of the back of the moon any more, now that we know what it’s like. I can remember when the first astronauts were on their way, I had this odd vision of the far side looking like the back of a stage set, roughly nailed together and unfinished. Then it turned out to be like the front side. And that’s what 85 looks like, or any of these astronomical ages that people are living to and past now: same old, same old, that is, if they can remember what same old was like. I can.

The innocent brightness of a new-born Day

Is lovely yet;

The clouds that gather round the setting sun

Do take a sober colouring from an eye

That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality;

Another race hath been, and other palms are won.

Thanks to the human heart by which we live,

Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,

To me the meanest flower that blows can give

Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

That’s the conclusion of the Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood by William Wordsworth. I didn’t remember it all or even much of it; it’s a long ode. But I remembered clouds and immortality and thoughts that lie too deep for tears and the older I get the deeper those thoughts go although, ironically, they are closer to the surface and easier to express. That’s a perk of age.

It’s after midnight now but my blog checked in before the hour struck. I’ll be back before you know it, after I’ve slept. Our little lives are rounded by a sleep.

There’s more to my blog than meets the eye. My eyes are always busy. Today I will raise my eyes from my leg and my problems and consider some of the books that I’ve been reading and will be reading this month and following. I usually read two or three books at a time, not simultaneously, of course, but at different times of the day and in different venues.

These days, at breakfast, I am reading Among the Giants, about the first major archeological investigators who explored Easter Island and the behemoth statues on it. Easter Island has been on my bucket list for eons, (well, half a century) and I am finally going to see it in April. So I must know more before I leave. The book is a gift from the lovely woman I will be sharing a cabin with, a new friend met on the World number; it’s well written and exhaustively researched by Jo Anne Van Tilburg. I’m on page 111 (of 233 pages) and only now approaching Easter Island.

For months, off and on, I have been reading the collection of books that comprise The Outlander - on my IPad electronic reader. I actually downloaded it before I went on my “World Trip” but I was too busy sightseeing, eating, drinking, making friends, playing Trivial Pursuit and working on my next project (the screenplay which is just now coming to fruition (i.e. the first draft). It has been a welcome respite for my low ebb of the day on the recliner in my study area mid-afternoon.

At night on the sofa and with TV on for the company of a human voice I have been going over and over the book that my screenplay is based on, plus other peripheral reading to fill in details I need to give voices to the characters involved.

I used to pedal in the late afternoon (on a seated stationary bicycle, no hands required so I can hold a book) but I can’t for a while because of my leg, so the mysteries or other light reading I do while I pedal has to wait. I was reading Kurt Vonnegut’s unpublished collection, Bogambo Snuff Box, but it will have to wait.

New books have come in over Christmas and more to come with my birthday, one very special, a gift from a new friend I met on the theatre tour: The Year of Lear by James Shapiro. I’m looking forward to it. The new ones wait on a small bookcase in the hall until I pick them up and read them. Then I either lend them or give them to friends or to the in-house volunteer library in my building, or keep them. That;s why I need more bookcases.

It’s never-ending, isn’t it? And there is never enough time. I used to think that by the timeI was 80 I’d have enough time to relax and read books that I missed, that fell by the wayside, but I’m still too busy. Well, maybe when I’m 90?