This could be a Filipina niece dancing for TikTok, except it’s not. Even all the nieces and nephews have grown to adult size now. Well, the youngest of my wife’s younger sister’s kids might be about this age… but it is not her. Some people in my stories and artworks are made up from thin air.
I have gotten old. This summer has made me feel not merely old… but most sincerely old.
I was visiting my sister at the family farm in Iowa. My whole immediate family, two sons, a daughter, my wife, and I were together again all in one place for the first time in a couple of years. I made it clear that I plan to move to the farm from the Dallas area sometime in 2025. Getting away from the air pollution, traffic, and Texas heat of the big city is essential to my hopes of staying alive for a bit longer. However, my wife is still employed as a teacher in Texas. My daughter is an adult but will stay with her mother in Texas to ensure that her mother will be okay without me. They may both eventually move in with my sister and I, but for now there is good reason to be apart for a bit. Health reasons for me. Teaching job without worrying about going to the ER with me for my wife.
We more or less have to accept that the inevitable chess game with the Grim Reaper will happen, and nobody wins more than once or twice. Most lose the first try.
My blog was interrupted by my trip this week. The consecutive post streak will have to start again at zero. My writing has been seriously slowed by aging issues. I tend to pass out while writing and reading. I forget things in the middle of the process. Everything is mentally harder. But I am falling into vivid mini-dreams when I pass out. It sometimes seems like reliving a moment in my own life, or… strangely… reliving a moment in the distant past of someone else’s life. The Reaper’s chess board is set up somewhere near. I do have book projects under way. But twenty-four books may have to be enough. We shall see what more I can accomplish. We have to do more with less when we are reaching the end of the story of our life.
Most of my relevant life goes on deep inside my head now. Connecting with the outside world is getting ever harder. The coming darkness does not scare me. Like Mark Twain once allowed… “I am not worried about what comes after life. I was not alive for billions of years before I was born, and I was not bothered about it a bit.”
So, what is today’s blog post actually about? About how the final page of the book will soon be written and the whole book closed. It will not cease to exist. It will simply be over. And what comes after will go on to its appointed ends without me.
Catch a Falling Star 