Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Explanation ...

... for desultory blogging:
I have been preoccupied with chores such, as restoring order to my home office after spending a couple of weeks on the stories of mine that ran in The Inquirer Sunday. Also, I had to get my patio garden ready for winter -- which I pretty much finished yesterday, feeling absolutely wonderful doing pure manual labor (wondering all the while why I ever wanted to write -- not that I was any better at carpentry). Then I noticed I was feeling a bit stiff throughout my body (I noticed this especially while walking a few blocks to a favorite fish store and back). I went to Benediction last night, that stiffening continuing all the while. Then I took a hot bath and, after reading a bit, retired for the night -- right until 8 this morning.
I mention this in detail because there was a time in my life when I earned my living getting up day after day around 6 AM and working like that from 8 AM until about 4:30 PM (a half-hour off for lunch). Sleeping until 8 wouldn't have done back then. Could I have got up today, as I had those many years ago? Well, I was awake this morning at 6 -- and grateful I could back to bed. I believe that, if I had had to, I could have done the same this morning. But this time I would have been an old man pushing it.
The foregoing has been the first installment in what I hope will prove an interesting account of my increasing decrepitude, that time of life when one understands what Keats was getting at:
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs, 25
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs,
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.

3 comments:

  1. I don't trust Keats at all on this. He never got old.

    Plenty of young people are depressed, and plenty of old people beautiful.

    Have a look at this blog:

    http://advancedstyle.blogspot.com/

    And I know one woman very well who found a new love in her 80s!

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  2. Well, that is tue, Lee (that Keats never got old). But what he wrote is perfectly phrased!

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  3. I can relate. And ever since the surgery I seem to have become ever more, not less, susceptible to increased aches and pains when the weather turns cold and damp. I now have more empathy for folks who want to retire to hotter, drier climes. It sure does make your day rougher than it needs to be, some days.

    Hope your stiffness is temporary.

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