You might have seen some of these before… but only if you’ve been following me for a long time.

I wish I could be more efficient in my old age, especially with writing things for this blog, continuing to write good books, and doing all the things around the house that need to be done just to make my way from one week into the next. But now that I have to lug baskets of clothing to the washateria to get my clothes clean, and I have to pick my clothes up off the floor of the bedroom to put them in baskets, and my arthritis says “NO!” rather painfully every time I need to do these things, I get discouraged and have to be a nudist more or accept being a rather smelly individual.

I have also found that being in pain and having the volcano-hot weather make the pain worse slows me down when it comes to getting good ideas for the daily blog. This blog is a good example of what I am talking about.

The one thing that has gotten easier, ironically, is going to the toilet. Zip, splash, zoom! And I am done with something many people my age take a half hour or more with the assistance of a newspaper, I-phone, or a good book to accomplish. Dang! Eating lots of fiber does pay off.

Lately, I have been getting good signs from my book-sales dashboard at Amazon.. People have started buying and reading my books, at least, the ones with nudist characters in them. A Field Guide to Fauns and Recipes for Gingerbread Children lead the way with more than a thousand pages read on Kindle Unlimited between them. I have already made more than $8.00 total this month in only the last two weeks.

Like the male cardinal who shows up in our yard when good things are happening, it is a sign that it is not all done for nothing. $8.00 will make no real difference to my bank account. But it does show that people are reading my books. I know that this does not sound like the results of lots of readers reading, but remember, publishers, especially Amazon, always screw writers out of most of what they deserve when books are sold.

The most expensive of the books that are actually being bought are priced at less than $3.00, of which, most of that money goes towards Amazon’s e-book-making expenses (whatever those are). If I needed to make myself rich, I would never have become first a teacher, and then a fiction writer. Having readers is the thing. And these are a couple of my best books that are getting read.

So, I take it as a good sign. A symbol that I really am an author.

As you get older and closer to the last page of the novel of your life, it is entirely appropriate to take stock of the treasures you have accumulated in a long and rewarding life. In fact, you will probably have heirs looking to reap their inheritance after your long-awaited passing.

My children, unlike those of certain Republican politicians, don’t have much to gain by discovering the perfect untraceable poison. In fact, if I don’t live long enough to pay off my bankruptcy, they may only inherit medical debt and the rapt attention of Banko Merricka’s relentless debt-collecting agencies. (Since originally posting this essay, I have paid off my bankruptcy and inherited a third of the family farm. So, it is time to start letting the dog taste my food before eating it.)

But, as I am taking stock, what exactly do I need before I get the final handshake from Mr. G. Reaper? It turns out, I probably don’t need anything else. I have written more novels than I ever expected to. My children are grown into adulthood and take care of themselves now. And I am confident my wife, at eight years younger than me, will find somebody new to berate and explain to the myriad reasons that the new person is wrong about everything, and always will be… even if what you said was something she said was true the previous week.

Sure, if I had all the access to medical care and medicine that most other countries see as a human right, I might live longer. But my medical condition is bad enough that I would be seriously prolonging the pain and suffering. I enjoy being alive, but every day is a painful challenge, and, over time, that tends to get you down.

But what more do I want out of life?

Grandchildren would be nice. But none of mine are married yet, and only one of them seems to have found one he permanently likes. The countdown clock is ticking on that matter.

Well, recognition as a writer would also be nice. I came close to winning in a couple of novel-writing contests. A few readers have read and loved some of my books. Only one person ever hated my writing that told me about it, and he was a voice in my own head. There was also one reader who was not me that was somehow traumatized by one of my lesser books. But I have published way more books through four different publishers than I ever believed possible two decades ago.

But I was a successful teacher for three decades. I touched more than two thousand lives with my work in four different schools in three different districts and ten different classrooms… teaching four different subjects. I have no regrets about how I spent my life and what I got in return.

So, I am writing this believing this is not a maudlin topic. I don’t think I am actually going to pass away this weekend. I will probably get to finish at least one more work in progress. But nobody can say for sure that we will survive next month. Or next decade.

But pessimist that I am, things always turn out better than I think they will.

And afterthoughts?

If I had a magic lamp with a genie in it, my three wishes for the future would be;

1. That Americans would invent a pill that makes everybody into a genius filled with empathy for all creatures, even the vilest, human beings. And they would share it for free with the whole world.
2. That we would handle the climate crisis and all the future crises at least as well as we handled the nuclear crisis of the ’60s, the Cold War, the Coke vs Pepsi War, the Bugs vs Mickey War and every other war that didn’t wipe us out as a species in the past.
3. There will be no Monkey’s Paw consequences for our wishes being fulfilled. So, that’s how it is.

the heat has interfered with my posting.

These are puppets by Bill Baird as they are displayed in the Hanford MacNider Museum in Mason City, Iowa.

I will do more with this topic when I am back in Texas.