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.