I go back in time often. I reconstruct the past. Maybe I am doing this to make peace with it. The further back I go, the more I remember. Maybe this is because I have more to remember. I have hearing loss, so sometimes I have to fake it when people say something to me. And when I reply, if I have three points to make, I usually just remember two of them.

Who would ever have thought it would be this way? I never gave it any thought. I always presumed that I would be the exception to all the rules and remain in excellent mental and physical health until my dying days. I was going to live to be 100.

Now I’m not so sure. When I was twenty, I had at least 50 years left. And when I was 50, I had twenty years left. I am not going to say how many years I now have left because then those reading this dispatch would know how old I am, or at least be able to approximate. Then certain assumptions would be made about my age. I have seen this happen, and people who ought to have been more circumspect have been the culprits.

Cathy, our artist in residence, found a book at Bishop’s Attic Thrift Store that is as about as dark as a children’s book can be. In it, a grandmother lays in her bed, dying. The two children go and answer the door and it’s Death, taking the form of the Grim Reaper. The children stave off the Grim Reaper’s visiting grandmother, by giving their visitor lots and lots of coffee. The Grim Reaper explains to the children that grief and sorrow and joy and happiness go hand-in-hand. Then G.R. goes in and visits Grandmother.

The two Pams also read this book. We all agreed that this is not a book for young children, although Pam Meekin said that she’d read it to her 11-year-old granddaughter. I didn’t say it, but I thought that I would have been scared shitless if this had been read to me. I had a hard time with the dwarf in the dungeon in the purple spined Golden Book Encyclopedia and this was just a single image. I would not have been able to handle a lengthy narrative like the one that I described.

Okay. The rest of the afternoon was not as bleak. Cathy and I had a good time, doing artsy fartsy things. I was given matt board by the owners of Sasquatch Frame Shop. I mounted some larger Erik Carle stickers on the boards. And Cathy matted a few illustrations. After (and this is the amazing part), Cathy and I sorted through the nonfiction books that Cheryl Chapman brought in a few days ago. Cathy oww and ahhed over the older books. I was pleased that, first of all, Cathy feels comfortable in the former banquet room of the historic Eagle Hotel, and secondly, that she is now interested in helping out with sorting and categorizing books.

This activity is going to keep us young.

Next: 38. 2/7/25: Today