Art and life and retirement?

Mr. H and I, good friends in our early years before time and tide and college took us off in different directions, will both turn 65 next year and it turns out we've both been having similar thoughts about somehow getting older than we ever believed we'd become. God obviously wants us to have these discussions or else She wouldn't have brought Mr. H out from Maine in order for us to have them.

The mind goes more quickly in some than in others.

Well, I had my annual physical this morning after breakfast at the usual place, then back home to catch a bus downtown to take BART to San Francisco and meet Mr. H at Harrington's by noon. Stressful, don't you think, getting up early to have breakfast and read the paper quickly so that I could get to the doctor's office on time, then catch the bus to get me to BART in what turned out to be fifteen seconds before the train departed? I'm thinking of taking all of next week off to recover.

No one is finding this funny.

Remember my happy little rumination over finding and buying small individual serving bottles of wine at Safeway yesterday? The thought I'd keep my consumption to two serving bottles of sake or wine in an evening? Three if it were a hot Saturday night when I needed to throw caution to the wind? Well, I indeed had the two small bottles of sake last night and then, not missing a beat, a bottle of the Merlot (it not being a Saturday night, but what the hell, I was kicking off my new plan for sensible consumption!), then (what else) the three remaining bottles of Merlot, knocking them down like bowling pins. All of them, in other words. Fairly clear headed this morning, but not the way you should prepare for an annual physical. Here in Oakland.