Fate of a Hermit

I haven't posted much here in recent days.

I'm still writing as much as ever, but lately all that effort is going into some of my Great Unfinished Novels. And that is proceeding pretty well for a guy who will be 78 in a few weeks. My mental still is working well enough that I can compose the majority of what I want to write ahead of time in my head, and so I am able to keep up the flow from my head to the keyboard with surprising fluency and variety for two or three hours at a stretch, and in fact, after I get tired of typing and have to stop, my mind doesn't stop working. Instead it just keeps on churning out stuff for hours more, and to deal with that I have to resolve not to sweat out forgetting and so losing something permanently. The chances are still good that I will remember most of it during the next session the next night. Most of this writing takes place in the wee hours after midnight, in my life which consists of many short stretches of activity punctuated by brief naps that can't be considered to be real sleep, when I'm not doing other things, like tending to my chores and mainly trying to finish the very difficult second stained glass pane of the nine involved in my big "Iris Window."

Another thing that's happening to constrain my weblogging is that though the news still prompts me to say something, recently it hasn't done so well enough to move me to actually type some comment. The national and the world scenes seem to me to be taking naps of their own, from which they may or may not awaken before nightfull.

Still another reason had to do with my wife's trip to Florida, to spend a month looking in on her many relatives down there and also on mine -- two second cousins about my age whom I have been close to all my life.

She arrived in Florida safely last night, driving the Cadillac that she inherited from her mother, and so it has started, my stay here with only the one cat and the squirrels and the numerous birds to keep me company.

Before she left, my wife did a great job of stocking the kitchen with so much of my kind of food that she called herself an "enabler," and she said that she was enabling me to keep on being a hermit, with the strong possibility of not having to drive anywhere to get anything till she got back, except maybe to get milk.

But that brings up what had been bothering me. Because of my nearly pathological reluctance to go out on the road, and because the few relatives I have are far away in other states, and because the many friends I have here are all deeply immersed in their own lives and I don't see anything of them for weeks at a time, this means that now days will go by when I won't see or hear from any other human beings, and that in turn means that if something really serious were to happen and I am unable to get to a phone or anything, it would be more days before that situation would be discovered.

This applies only to the house. For some reason I am not at all concerned about anything that could happen in the woods, in my garden, or in my workshop.

My wife has said that she and I will talk to each over the phone every day, but I won't hold her to that. I know where her mind goes when she gets down there among all her friends and family that are such a big part of her life. "Out of sight, out of mind," you know. She has taken numerous long absences before, and I survived all those without any trouble. Should a few more years added to me this time make things any different now?

So there it is. I just have to promise myself not to climb any trees, fight any bears, or stick my fingers into any electrical outlets, and though these woods undoubtedly are teeming with nice Argentine ladies well versed in the art of the tango, they must be doing so only up beyond the first bend in the road.

So I will just have to let events work themselves out in their own sweet way. But that's what I've done anyway, not all the time, but most of the time, and generally that's been okay. ...Generally...