It won't mean much to me, I thought, being quarantined at home. I'm old, I'm retired and I don't have the responsibilities or obligations of younger adults.

Many of my closest friends live far away so I am long accustomed to regular, lengthy telephone or Skype/Zoom calls. No big sacrifice with this quarantine, thought I. Little will change for me.

Wrong.

What I hadn't considered are the meetings and lunches and other social get-togethers with local friends that have stopped. Suddenly, I have a lot more free time than before quarantine. Enough for it to be abundantly noticeable now. Plenty of time now to think about things in a leisurely manner.

I picked up some more time for myself last week when I stopped watching the daily Trump team television show. There is never any trustworthy news and when there is anything worth knowing, it is widely reported elsewhere. So I don't subject myself to his petty self-aggrandizement anymore.

In one of last week's Trump TV shows, even Dr. Deborah Birx brought shame down on herself by elaborately kissing the presidential posterior in praise of his scientific acumen. So much for anything she says from now on.

On the other hand, there is New York Governor Andrew Cuomo's daily report. The contrast to the president is stunning, leaving me to lament every day that Cuomo is not running the entire U.S. COVID-19 response. There are other governors and mayors, too, doing important work in their communities even while taking threats from the president.

Weeping comes easily to me now. I tear up reading stories about the shortages of protective gear for medical professionals who nevertheless keep risking their own lives going to work, doing everything possible to help the afflicted. Just a photo of an empty big-city street can set me off on a weeping binge.

Dreams have never stayed with me beyond wispy snapshots for a few seconds when I first awaken. During the past week or so, those wisps have been of me alone on a rainy, dark street, accompanied by an overwhelming sense of being alone.

I use up some of my new-found time wondering if others in lockdown are having similar dreams, and there is more of the time now to get back to reading books which I had recently neglected.

Oh, do I wish I had something more profound to tell you. Since my imagination is lacking in that regard, here are some small but not unimportant things related to the pandemic I think might be useful for you to know:

VIRUS-RELATED SOCIAL SECURITY SCAM
Gail S. Ennis, Inspector General for Social Security, is warning “about fraudulent letters threatening suspension of Social Security benefits due to COVID-19.”

”Social Security will not suspend or discontinue benefits because their offices are closed,” reports IG Ennis.

“...Social Security beneficiaries have received letters through the U.S. Mail stating their payments will be suspended or discontinued unless they call a phone number referenced in the letter.

“Scammers may then mislead beneficiaries into providing personal information or payment via retail gift cards, wire transfers, internet currency, or by mailing cash, to maintain regular benefit payments during this period of COVID-19 office closures.”

Although Social Security offices are closed, employees are working and no beneficiary will lose benefits, have them decreased or suspended due to the virus. Any communication that says so is a scam.

Read more here.

SPECIAL SUPERMARKET HOURS FOR ELDERS
Supermarket chains and some other retailers have created special hours for elders to shop. Some designate these hours every day, others offer it for one or two days a week. What many have in common is that the hours are early in the morning - 7AM to 9AM or 8AM to 9AM, for example.

Some stores in my area are doing this but I wonder who decided that elders do not need fresh produce, fresh meat or cooked chicken which are not on shelves yet at that early hour.

Plus, my pharmacy is in my grocery story but does not open until 9AM making it difficult to do food and drug shopping in one go. Personally, I'm ignoring "senior hours" on my once-weekly trek away from home.

But if it works for you, AARP has done your homework for you with a long list of chain stores that are doing this and their hours. You will find that list here.

Be sure to check if your store participates.

YOUR EMAILS AND INTERESTING STUFF SUGGESTIONS
I always appreciate your emails with ideas for stories or Interesting Stuff items and rely on them for a lot of what you eventually see in these pages. But apparently now, I am not the only one with extra time on his or her hands.

Your missives have been arriving in great bundles into in my inbox, sometimes four or five or more emails in a day from the same person. Multiply that many videos and article suggestions (often several in one email) from two or three dozen of you can imagine that I can feel defeated at trying to get through them all.

So if you wouldn't mind, please try to edit yourselves. And please forgive me if I do not reply to your email - sometimes I'm just too worn out to do that.

And how is the quarantine going at your place?

Peter Tibbles, who lives in Melbourne, Australia, has been handling the Elder Music section of this blog on Sundays for about 10 years, and doing a spectacular job of it. His knowledge and taste are peerless.

I don't like to interfere with such fine work but now and then, I have a little something to say about music. Today is one of those times.

This came to mind when I first met my new physical therapist who tends exclusively to feet. I wrote about that last Friday. It turns out she had lived, studied and worked in Manhattan for several years and loves it as much as I do.

Our conversation reminded me of a 1946 record album (remember 78s?) about New York City that I last mentioned here way back in 2009 – “Manhattan Tower”. I sent it to her and took a listen myself, which I had not done in several years. I found myself smiling throughout, while feeling all warm and fuzzy.

There is a back story to this.

I was a little girl of no more than five or six when my parents obtained the album at its first release. It made such an impression on me that I made it my own. I played those two 78s hundreds of times over many years and I am convinced it is what began my love affair with New York – nothing else explains my yearning, from earliest childhood, to live there.

The album is a love letter to New York City, a suite composed and conducted by Gordon Jenkins with the lead performances sung by Eliot Lewis and Beverly Mahr. Never heard of them? Me neither – except on this album.

There are four parts – Magical City, The Party, New York's My Home and Love in the Tower. The arrangement can sound overblown and schmaltzy nearly 75 years later and maybe it is. But there is something about music from our youth that persists.

In the 1950s, a new version of “Manhattan Tower” was released adding many more songs including what was a big hit for Patti Page back then, Married I Can Always Get.

I don't like all these extra tunes so I never listen to that version. The 16-minute original seems to me to be too perfect to mess with and I discovered that I still know every word of the lyrics.

Music from our youth tends to stick with us as we get old. And we can often recall events from our younger years more easily than what we had to dinner last evening. So maybe you, too, have some early music memories that you still love.

Here is the original ”Manhattan Tower” from 1946, the full 16-minute suite - for those of you who don't find it too treacly.

There is now a Wikipedia page with a background on the album and more recordings of the original and subsequent longer versions at YouTube.

There sits on my desk a black, seven- by 10-inch, spiral note book filled with about 100 lined pages that I use to jot down notes about potential stories for this blog.

Because old age has robbed me of the ability to remember any “brilliant” thought for longer than few seconds, it is imperative that I immediately scribble down anything useful at the moment it occurs to me, or lose it forever.

Sometimes these notes are baffling, like that headline above. What was I thinking when I wrote that? And why – especially knowing how fleeting these thoughts can be - couldn't I have bothered to write even a handful of additional words to provide a hint or two about the idea?

But I still like the phrase and after spending 10 or 15 minutes trying my best to recall the original thought (to no avail), I've decided to run with it today in relation to time.

Old age is greedy: it wants all my time.

You name it, it takes longer now than even two or three years ago. Walking, because it is our primary mode of transportation, is a big culprit. I'm slower now and when I think, for example, I'll make a quick stop at the market – just a quart of milk and loaf of bread – it takes 30 minutes and that's not counting the drive to and from.

This is a different phenomenon than the one I mentioned not long ago about time disappearing as though I had blacked out for awhile.

In this case, I am aware of time's passage and I suppose it's irritating because I am still unaccustomed to how much I have slowed down, making my time estimates all wrong.

Not to mention that there are things I can't or don't do anymore and so need to find someone to help out. Change a light bulb? Are you kidding? No more ladders for me. But even when someone is here for a visit, I'm as likely as not to forget to ask.

It's perfectly true that finding oneself in the bedroom and wondering why is not an act exclusive to old people but I'm pretty sure the number of occurrences has increased. More time gone to old age.

The experts tell us it is not uncommon for old people to have trouble concentrating and that's another way old age has been greedy with me - my distraction level seems to increase by the day which lengthens any project.

Recently, I was picking up stuff I'd left lying around the living room, found a note to myself about a quotation I wanted to check out so I hopped on the computer to track it down. I couldn't have waited until I finished the task at hand? Apparently not.

That led to another click and another and you how that goes. Next thing I knew it was dinner time and I still hadn't straightened up the living room.

Folding clean laundry is instant distraction territory for me. Once I've wandered on to something else, it might be bedtime before I get it done and then only because I fold laundry on the bed and need space to sleep.

The biggest aid to old age's greed for my time is tiredness which has shortened my days to about eight useful hours. It takes near two hours each morning for me to get enough coffee and news in me to be ready to shower, dress and eat breakfast.

By then, it's 9AM and I know weariness will overtake me by 3PM after which little gets done. It takes careful planning to get all the things I once did in 12-plus hours a day crammed into such a short period of time.

In terms of slowing down, the trick, I think, is to make the effort to adjust to it as a new normal. I have been trying and I make small inroads. Occasionally now, I deliberately shorten the day's to-do list so that I can finish it.

There is no point in lamenting the slowdown in old age and there might be an upside. As much as I worry about what daffodils blooming in February portends for the planet's future, they put a smile on my face last week. At my previous speedy walking pace, I might have missed seeing them.

As with just about everything I have discovered about old age, I doubt I am alone in these changes. If we live long enough, they come to most of us. Is any of this familiar to you?

We've discussed this several times before but I think it is worth coming back to because use of cannabis among elders continues to increase but I keep meeting people (in a state where it is legal) who are interested but hesitant to try it.

The little wicker basket next to my bed holds several brands and types of edible cannabis I use for sleep. It's quite a collection now. Currently, there are two kinds of chocolate, four of fruit-flavored gummies, one of lemon hard candies and a bottle of tincture.

Even when they contain the same dosage of THC, the effectiveness of each differs with me depending on how frequently I use it. One of my physicians and several marijuana dispensary employees have confirmed my experience, that the same product used every night will eventually stop working – which happened to me.

So now I keep that nice little variety around to mix it up from night to night.

Currently, 33 U.S. states and the District of Columbia have legalized cannabis to a greater or lesser degree. Some restrict usage to what is called “medical marijuana” that for purchase usually requires a card from a physician. Many other states now allow recreational marijuana.

Here is a map of current legal availability as of 25 June 2019. Follow this link for more information by individual state.

Oregon was the first state to decriminalize marijuana use and later legalized it for people 21 and older – first for medical use and then expanded to recreational use.

In the past month or two, I've noticed that my local Safeway supermarket is now selling CBD products. CBD is the non-psychoactive chemical in cannabis. It's counterpart, THC, gets you high.

When I first started experimenting with cannabis for sleep, I tried CBD. It worked about as well as a glass of water so I switched to THC which not only puts me to sleep, it keeps me there for seven to eight hours which I hadn't slept in a decade or more.

Other people say CBD works well for them.

When the subject of marijuana use comes up in conversation, it is predicable that someone will say, “Oh, but I wouldn't want to get high.” To which I can only say, “Why not?”

Mostly I'm asleep before the high kicks in because that takes about two hours with edibles as opposed to smoking pot which is almost immediate. (No smoking for me with COPD.)

I patronize several cannabis dispensaries in Oregon all of whom have told me that the majority of their customers are old people. WebMD reported on a 2018 survey of elders who use marijuana for chronic pain.

”...it reduced pain and decreased the need for opioid painkillers.

“Nine out of 10 liked it so much they said they'd recommend medical pot to others.

"'I was on Percocet and replaced it with medical marijuana. Thank you, thank you, thank you,' said one senior.”

Many say that marijuana doesn't eliminate pain but it does make it manageable.

Dr. Mark Wallace, a board member of the American Pain Society, told WebMD,

"'The geriatric population is my fastest-growing patient population. With medical marijuana, I'm taking more patients off opioids,' he said.

"'There's never been a reported death from medical marijuana, yet there are 19,000 deaths a year from prescription opioids. Medical cannabis is probably safer than a lot of drugs we give,' Wallace said.”

I've made sure my cannabis use is included on my list of medications so that doctors can consider drug interactions when/if they prescribe something new.

The body of scientific research suggests that cannabis is useful in treating a variety of conditions and diseases such as

• Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS)
• Anorexia due to HIV/AIDS
• Chronic pain
• Crohn's disease
• Epilepsy or seizures
• Glaucoma
• Multiple sclerosis or severe muscle spasms
• Nausea, vomiting or severe wasting associated with cancer treatment
• Terminal illness
• Tourette syndrome

Note that they don't list sleep but I can't be the only old person who has discovered that use.

The National Organization to Reform Marijuana Laws (NORML) which has been lobbying for legalization since 1970 reports that

”According to national polling data compiled by Gallup in October 2019, 66 percent of the public - including majorities of self-identified Democrats, Republicans, and Independents - favor adult-use legalization.

"Bipartisan support among the public for medical marijuana legalization is even stronger.”

I was in high school when I smoked my first joint. I enjoyed it then and, presumably, I still would if I could stay awake long enough to feel the high.

But what I can't figure out is how, through the decades, I had so much time to fool around - it's not like you get much done when you're stoned. Who knew, back then, that weed would be my key to getting a good night's sleep.

Certainly some TGB readers use cannabis. Let's hear from you, and if you want, feel free to use an alias in place of your name.

Hardly anyone disputes the belief that time seems to speed up as we grow old. If I recall correctly (not an automatic assumption), it starts around age 40. “I went to work Monday morning,” we might say, “and next thing I knew it was Friday.”

Anyone to whom this has happened more than once has a theory about the reason for it but that's not what I'm here to talk about today because a new twist on time's swift passage has turned up in my life.

Think of the new one as the micro compared to the original macro.

Until now, my complaints about time's speed were confined to the long-ish term as in the first paragraph above. Then, recently, I laid out the little boxes into which I count out medications for the coming week.

I have two of them – morning and evening - and I've been doing this for going on three years. I could do it in my sleep. It takes about five minutes and I'm set for the week.

Before I go any further, let me note that I hate this chore. I understand that is an over-the-top response to such a minor task but it is nevertheless true and may or may not relate to the the time issue.

As usual, two or three weeks ago, I didn't get around to counting out pills until nearly dinner time on Saturday. I was timing something on the stove but I knew this dumb little pill task takes no more than five minutes so I could do both at once.

I checked the clock as I started counting. When I finished, I looked at the clock again and 15 minutes had passed. 15 MINUTES??? Did I black out for ten minutes? If so, why was I still standing?

A few days later, it happened again. The walk to the mailbox and back takes about three or four minutes. This time, 20 or 25 minutes went by before I was home again. I know this because I was 10 minutes late for a phone visit with a friend.

Did I stop to chat with a neighbor? Did I wander over to the adjacent park? I had no memory of doing either. Where did the time go?

These small time slippages are turning up in my life more frequently. I'm not worried about incipient dementia or even plain old forgetfulness but I am trying to explain it to myself.

With the pill counting, did I get distracted and stop counting while I thought over something I had read? That's probably not out of the question although I don't remember what it was I might have been thinking. Or, could it have always taken 15 minutes and I thought it was only five?

Maybe the same thing happened on my walk to the mailbox. I do purposefully walk more slowly now to accommodate my COPD. I'd rather things take longer than to go too quickly and be left heaving for breath.

Or could it be...

It's a mystery to me and it doesn't seem fair, does it. I mean, already whole days speed by when we're old, even whole weeks. Now I have to fold missing minutes into my shrinking day?

Does any of this ring a bell for you?

To my surprise, Friday's post about disappearing internet friends drew a lot more comment that I would have expected. It appears to be a common problem, losing track of web friends.

It was lovely to hear from so many readers who are still here but who don't comment. There is nothing wrong with that; no one should feel obligated to leave a comment. Here are some notes after re-reading through the comments starting with

COMMENT AUTOFILL
Some people mentioned they do not like entering their information every time they want to comment; some others don't have the problem. That is because autofill (or not) is a function of your browser. Plus, new privacy restrictions have recently gone into effect which may have removed your autofill.

Every browser handles privacy issues differently. You can find out how to change your autofill settings by searching “how to enable autofill in firefox”. Substitute the name of your browser (chrome, safari, etc.) for firefox.

SURPRISES
I am surprised to find out how many of you have been reading Time Goes By since I lived in Manhattan, followed along when I moved to Portland, Maine, and then to Oregon in 2010. That is so nice to hear.

A few who have not commented in a long while wondered if I would remember their names and in every case, I do – it is terrific to see you here again.

I was pleased to be able to put one reader together with another to find out what had happened to a third person they both know.

WHEN WE DIE
Regarding my demise, I have a blog post written titled, If You're Reading This, I'm Dead. When I first wrote it, I meant to update it every year but I think I've fallen behind on that and I'll put it on my to-do list.

My good friend, healthcare proxy and executor, Autumn, will post that entry when I die. You might recall her keeping you updated in June of 2017 when I'd had the Whipple surgery and was out of commission for a week or so.

People who have blogs, Facebook pages or some other social media presence can set up something similar. It's everyone else – the people who comment but don't have an online space of their own that we lose track of and I don't have a solution for that.

Thank you to everyone who finds this online place to be worth your time. After all these years, I still enjoy doing it and even more, reading each day what you have to say.

THE ALEX AND RONNI SHOW – 25 January 2020
Alex and I recorded this episode on Saturday, the only day we were both available at the same time. (I thought retirement means you aren't so busy anymore...)

We covered more territory that we usually do: pockets (or lack thereof) in clothing, health (typical old people talk), racism, Alex's beard, hair loss, the impeachment trial and so on.

Here it is:

You can find Alex's show – Alex Bennett's Ramble – on Facebook and Apple Podcasts.

“Ghosting” is a slang term among young people (they come and go so fast, this one may already be out of fashion) for having been dropped by someone you thought was a friend or, at least, a good acquaintance.

When someone ghosts you, he or she abruptly stops telephoning or responding to text messages or posting on your social media pages. When I was in high school, we referred to such behavior as cutting someone dead.

Recently, I was perusing some posts from the early years of this blog (TGB has been here since 2004). Reading along day-by-day, I was amazed to see a lot of familiar names, commenters who are still around, who have been contributing to these conversations for a decade and more.

Some of those people are “blog friends”, people with whom I exchange email now and then (or, sometimes, more frequently). Mostly we haven't met face-to-face, but we know one another quite well after all this time. I think of them as friends.

Or, perhaps they are more like neighbors – people we “see” regularly, stop to pass the time of day and continue on our way until next time.

As I continued reading those ancient posts, other names stood out too. Not close internet friends, but people I had come to know through their comments and occasional emails. Why their names leapt out now, however, is that they have not shown up in the comments for a long time, years.

What happened to them?

Certainly, some of them stopped reading Time Goes By and unsubscribed. That happens all the time. People leave, others join and so it goes. Nothing out of the ordinary but still, one wonders.

So I checked some of those names against the subscriber list. Several were no longer subscribed but a larger number are still there and the emails have not bounced which would indicate a closed email account. So they are either still reading TGB or – what?

Are they dead? That is not an unreasonable question for a blog about what it's like to grow old. And it is also not unreasonable to believe that no one unsubscribed them – that's hardly on the to-do list when a loved one dies.

One thing I've learned from producing this blog for so many years is how much of ourselves and our personalities we reveal over time in words, phrases and ideas we choose. Years of reading the thoughts of people on a variety of topics cannot help but lead us to care about them, to feel a connection.

That makes it more than disconcerting when they disappear. Sometimes it happens as I have described above – that I didn't notice for a good while after a reader stopped commenting. Other times, I notice after a couple of weeks: Geez, what happened to Mary, or John, etc.

I'm willing to go out on a limb and say that I doubt any TGB readers are “ghosting” me. Some, undoubtedly, decide they have gleaned all they want from Time Goes By and move on.

But some, too, have died and there is no way for me – or for readers who enjoyed a person's comments – to know.

I suppose it makes sense. Who in a family knows much of anything about what other family members do online. Or further, knows that mom or dad or anyone else in the family has been enjoying conversations, maybe for many years, at a certain website and feels a kinship with those people.

I've written about these cyber-friends in the past and how important they can become.

”I believe that the internet arrived just in time for our generation(s) to develop a new kind of friendship that opens – quite literally – a world of possibilities for human connections that can prevent loneliness, expand our horizons and help us form bonds that can be as nurturing as some in-person relationships.”

About two months ago, a woman who had infrequently but regularly posted comments here over many years emailed to tell me she had entered hospice. She was grateful in her last days, she said, that someone else was doing the small chores that had become difficult for her, and she could die in peace.

We exchanged several emails talking about all kinds of things and then several days went by without a response from her. I knew she had died.

Then I did what I always do when someone I know has died. I lit a candle. I sat quietly for a good while and thought about her. I went went back over some old blog posts and read her comments. What a remarkable memory jog it is to have that – perhaps a little like saved, hand-written, snail-mail letters in days before the internet.

A whole life of many decades gone, to be grieved and honored. Undoubtedly, some of the names that have gone missing from TGB comments have died. I'm so sorry to not know.

On Monday's post, long-time TGB reader Salinda Dahl made reference to one particular way her life has changed:

”My life, though so much 'smaller' than in the past...I stand smiling, befuddled, feeling somehow less-than. But when my secret life is in sway, oh the inexplicable wonder and beauty, and sometimes terror! Big, very big.”

(I'm inviting her to expand on that thought in the comments below today.)

Although I'm not certain, I think I know some of what Salinda means. My life has become smaller for reasons that can all be filed under one header, “You Got Old.”

Even before the cancer diagnosis in 2017, I had begun slowing down my life. It's not that I made a decision to change my activity level exaxtly; mostly I just followed inclinations as they appeared.

Fewer social evenings out. Internet purchases and delivery instead of shopping trips. And I generally gave up entertaining at home and on holidays because my energy and stamina began going south in relation to my intentions.

I had some earlier practice at cutting back social life after I took a job that involved a four-hour, round-trip commute which. If you've never done that, you might not realize that although you can get a lot of reading done, it is all about work and sleep during the week and chores catch-up all weekend.

There is no time for much else when you lose 20 waking hours from a week.

During my three years at that job, I think I became accustomed to having a smaller social life and some friends disappeared when I so regularly declined invitations because there was simply no time for a social life beyond a quick coffee date, for example, among weekend chores.

But that's not an excuse anymore. All kinds of things change as old age settles upon us. Certainly less energy in general leaves me tired but there are other reasons too.

Sleep overtakes me much earlier now. It's hard for me to follow a conversation let alone participate after 6PM. My brain seems to stop parsing language by then. Mostly, nowadays, I see friends for lunch.

For some reason too (I think we've touched on this one previously in these pages), more than one trip out of the house per day is all I can handle. If I've done the grocery shopping, stopped at the pharmacy and driven to the cannabis dispensary, I'm done for the day.

Sometimes I'm stuck doing all those things in addition to rehab or seeing a doctor. On those days, there is not a chance of budging me from home once I get back there.

Another important contribution to a smaller life: Old age is greedy – it wants all the time it can steal from you and even more if you plug in a disease or ailment.

Our bodies are wearing out as we reach late life and force us to slow down almost everything we do. Household chores I once did for myself require a handyman or specialist – more time gone. For decades, I cleaned the house on Saturday morning. The goal was to finish by noon and most of the time I did. Now? It's a joke. I do a little every day but I don't finish everything every week anymore.

More doctor visits. Weekly pill counting into little boxes. If you don't live in a big city and give up driving, trade in that half-hour trip to the dentist for 60 or 90 minutes each way on public transportation.

COPD has cut my normal walking speed at least in half. Something in my condition or perhaps a medication has weakened my hands so I cannot carry as much weight – e.g. groceries – as I did not long ago. More time gone. And so on.

There is no telling how many books I haven't read, movies I haven't seen and blog posts that are not written because life's boring maintenance, which I hardly noticed for 70 years, takes so damned much time now.

I feel the walls of my life closing in, making the room - life itself – smaller.

But here's the great surprise: For all this shrinkage, my life doesn't feel small. It feels huge, much larger than all those years I worked in a glamorous media business, traveled the world and was always on the go when I was home.

Let it be said that I'm no stranger to lots of time alone. I've always needed more of that than many people but now my inner life is so much richer, filled with new curiosity, understanding and insight to life and to myself almost daily discovering my truths, if not universal ones.

Maybe that's the purpose of old age, to slow us down just so we can have the time to savor and delight in the realizations that become available to us now if we pay attention. To quote Salinda again,

”Oh the inexplicable wonder and beauty, and sometimes terror! Big, very big.”

What a splendid thing to have happen when all the rest of the world believes old age is a bummer. This has become the best time of my life – just as I believed every earlier time was the best when I was living them.

It is good to have these few days at the end of an old year and beginning of a new one to reflect on what has been and wonder at what will come.

In my personal life, I gained a second disease, COPD, and just kept going anyway even though all the statistics say I should be dead of pancreatic cancer by now.

Obviously, I am not and am living in golden time – way past my life expectancy. I am grateful beyond measure.

Outside my personal milieu, there are only two stories that matter: Climate change and what fresh hell Trump will inflict upon us next. I think a lot about the immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers – especially the children snatched from those parents and scattered around the 50 states.

The Trump administration kept poor records and some of those families will never be reunited. America, the United States of America, made this happen and I am ashamed.

The big thing about a brand new year is that we have a clean slate upon which to imagine how we can collectively make things better. Maybe we're only dreaming but every great thing I ever heard of began with a dream.

As has been so in years past, I am deeply fortunately to have the best group of readers any blogger could wish for. You are here every day – smart, caring, thoughtful, compassionate, funny, and you say the nicest things.

As this new year makes it way through the universe, may every one of us have enough.

[This post will stay up through tomorrow and we will return with a new post as usual on Friday.]

Now, tell us about your 2019 and your dreams for 2020.

It's that time of year again. You know, the gazillions of 10 Best lists, although many of them, when I wasn't looking, seem to have morphed into 50 Best and 100 Best.

Are there even 100 airlines in the world? I'll repeat what I said here a few days ago: Too many choices is no choice at all.

(There is even a list of 50 New Year's Resolution Ideas. Do you suppose there really are people who can't work that out on their own?)

New Years Resolutions are a long-time, annual ritual for many people, a chance for a clean slate to put a plan in place to improve one's life in some way. Back when I did such things, I mostly thought about finding a new job I would like better or getting married or losing 15 pounds.

Nowadays, at age 78, resolutions don't seem to apply as much in old age. After all, how much time is left for me to enjoy whatever fix I might manage to accomplish after I've struggled to achieve it. Plus, old age often brings restrictions to what is possible.

That is certainly true for me.

Unless it's totally flat ground, I don't walk there. And I don't do stairs anymore without thinking about each step and breath. I almost never accept nor plan evening activities now. Dinner at 9PM? Are you kidding? That's bedtime.

But there are still all kinds of other things one could resolve to try in a new year: run for local office, for example. Or learn a language. Volunteer. Start a book club or discussion group.

Another choice is to skip the whole idea and keep doing what you've been doing if that's what you enjoy. That's my decision this year.

I'm not making resolutions or setting new goals for 2020 because I have no memory that I every achieved the ones I made. Why would that change now.

These days, I live with two incurable diseases, cancer and COPD, which limit my life each in its own way. Outside of following doctors' instructions and doing what I can to remain otherwise healthy, I'm stuck with the limitations they impose.

Many TGB readers have their limitations too. It is true that few of us get to the end of long lives without some impediment, great or small.

So my interest in the new year – and perhaps yours too – has changed. It has less to do with accomplishment and more about hope and curiosity.

For me, it involves first, the result of the impeachment trial and second, whether President Donald Trump is convicted and removed from office or not, the November election.

Either way - with Trump as the Republican candidate or someone else – it will be an election like no other we have seen. With more at stake than we have ever contemplated in a previous election.

If Trump wins election, I believe we – humankind, the planet – are doomed. If the Democrat wins (I hardly care which), humankind might eke out a chance. A small one, but a chance nonetheless.

In this bright, shiny new year that is almost upon us, I hope to live long enough to see that outcome. I have no idea if, in my health condition, it is reasonable to have that hope. But it's my goal for the year 2020.

What are your resolutions or goals or hopes for next year?

There is a lot in my life to be thankful for this year. First of all, I didn't think I would still be here for what is my third Thanksgiving since they told me I have cancer.

Who could have guessed? Not me. There are not enough words in the English language for me to properly thank the many medical people who have helped keep me going - from the surgeon to that wonderful man Keith who brought me a perfect cup of coffee each day I was in the hospital, and these too – so many:

Nurses, medical assistants, certified nursing assistants, doctors of various specialties, schedulers, phlebotomists, physicians assistants, medical technicians and all the other professionals I have forgotten to list.

To my friends and neighbors and even a former husband who all, living far away and near, keep in regular touch and are always caring and understanding as I navigate through this end-of-life journey.

And last though never least, as they say, you dear readers of Time Goes By. You help give shape and order to my days, you let me bang on about anything that's on my mind and are always politely receptive to (and sometimes even enthusiastic about) my meandering thoughts. Every day I am thankful for your stories, your experience, your advice and your humor.

You fill in useful information I've left out, and you teach me things I doubt I could learn in any other way. For all of you I am thankful and my greatest wish today is that you have as much to be thankful for as I do.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

[I am away for the holiday but will be back here with a new Interesting Stuff on Saturday.]

Thanksgiving week reminds me that quite a long while ago – 12 or 15 years I would guess, or more – I spent a five-hour drive home from visiting a friend for the holiday in the company of a person who had planned each step of his life.

He worked it all out on a gigantic graph he updated as events and plans came to be. It started at graduations from college and law school, then career goals, financial goals, when to marry, when have children and how many, etc. all on a timeline with target dates to be met.

It got more granular than that but I have forgotten the particulars. What I recall is thinking (then and now) what polar opposites we were – his pre-planned, methodical roadmap through life as opposed to my more free-wheeling, lets-see-what-happens, laissez faire, meandering path.

It was always that way for me. Maybe it started when I was a kid, when parents make all the big decisions, and I never outgrew it. Or, perhaps I had a commitment problem. If I don't make a firm choice – my thinking might have been - I can't blame myself or regret what goes wrong.

Never having known what I wanted to do in life, I have mostly just let things happen, leaving necessary choices until timing required them. It's not that I was a ditherer, unable to make up my mind. Never that.

But I am lazy and, for example, when I needed a job as after a TV show I was working on was canceled, I put off doing the legwork until, more often than not, work turned up from out of the blue.

Not every time but frequently enough that you could call it a pattern, someone I knew telephoned: “Hey, Ronni, are you working? I've got a job to talk with you about” or something thereabouts and my problem was solved.

Back then I made light of such occurrences by attributing them to a guardian angel watching out for me even if she or he too often waited to deliver until the wolf was scratching at the door.

That angel probably has had something to do, too, with my personal life going well most of the time. Or smoothly enough to not complain much. (Don't take that statement as gospel, though. Old age seems to have provided me with a sunshine filter on my past that screens out a lot of the bad and bitter stuff.)

But it is hard to fault the angel for this end-of-life journey I have been on since mid-2017. I expected to be dead of cancer before now yet here I am. I expected to be in pain of the debilitating sort. Not so, so far.

I am acutely aware of my great, good fortune and not just in regular and interesting employment. I've been blessed with health, enough money to get by without too much effort and wonderful friends. After that, the smaller stuff is only an annoyance.

Even with my playing it so loose, life has turned out remarkably well and I really ought to remind myself of that more often than just on Thanksgiving.

Enjoy the holiday, my friends.

Barely two months after I was told I have pancreatic cancer and one month after the Whipple surgery, I posted a story of quotations from people ancient and modern about death.

Now that I am coming up on two-and-a-half years since then during which time I have gained even a more up close and personal relationship with my own death, I wondered if my choices of quotations that speak to me have changed.

There are a dozen or so quotations about death in that post and I must say that looking back with newly educated eyes on the subject, I did a pretty good job of selection. But there are a few that take on a stronger resonance now.

This one because death is serious but should not be somber:

”Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.” - George Bernard Shaw

Because I know even better now that this one is so too:

“A dying man needs to die, as a sleepy man needs to sleep, and there comes a time when it is wrong, as well as useless, to resist.” – Stewart Alsop

Because death is a prerequisite to continued life on Earth:

"It is life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.” - Steve Jobs (who died of pancreatic cancer in 2011, eight years after diagnosis)

I have always liked quotations. I keep running lists of them by topic, adding those that are new (to me) as they turn up. This one, that sits in a small frame on my desk, is from Albus Dumbledore, the head master of Hogwarts school in the Harry Potter series of books:

”Call him Voldemort, Harry. Always use the proper name for things. Fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself.”

Exactly. It is why, at this blog, we use the word “old” instead of such euphemisms as “golden-ager”, for example, and “death” instead of “passed” or “demise.”

The 29 months since my cancer diagnosis have given me a lot of time to think about the death sentence it puts me under. Dying is no longer an abstract idea I can pretend is far in the future anymore.

So here are a few more quotations about death that have stuck with me since I found them (or they found me).

”While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.” - Leonardo da Vinci

”Death smiles at us all, all a man can do is smile back.” - Marcus Aurelius

”If life must not be taken too seriously, then so neither must death. - Samuel Butler

This next one opens up a world of speculation to ponder and play with about death.

”Death is only the end if you assume the story is about you.” - Welcome to Night Vale (Podcast)

”Death is a law, not a punishment.” - Jean Dubos

”I was discovering that I was not afraid of death; rather, I was in awe of it.” - Kathryn Mannix

”Do not seek death. Death will find you. But seek the road which makes death a fulfillment.” - Dag Hammarskjold

The first half of Hammarskjold's quotation is a good lead-in to a story about death that I have liked since I first read it when I was a kid and have posted it here before (all good stories deserve repetition).

From W. Somerset Maugham in 1933, The Appointment in Samarra as told by Death.

”There was a merchant in Baghdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, Master, just now when I was in the marketplace I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me. “She looked at me and made a threatening gesture, now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me.

“The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went.

“Then the merchant went down to the marketplace and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came to me and said, why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning?

“That was not a threatening gesture, I said, it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.”

Now it is your turn. Do you have any quotations about death and dying you want to post here?

A friend emailed about his grandson. “What's it like,” the nine-year-old asked, “to be dying?”

(Dear god, is this what happens when kids are done with dinosaurs? I would have guessed that at least a couple more years would go by before this kind of serious question comes up.)

The short answer is that it's not much different from living. I eat and sleep and read and watch TV or movies, see friends, write this blog as I have done for years along with cleaning house, grocery shopping, cooking, the laundry, etc. You know, the everyday necessities and pleasures of life.

The longer answer is that each one of those ordinary tasks takes longer now than before the cancer diagnosis and the surgery that took several months of recovery.

Now, since the additional diagnosis of COPD, they all take even longer and require more rest periods while I'm doing each one.

Getting that stuff done has become the framework of my life – the measure of my days – so that I can be free to spend time on whatever catches my fancy and, regularly, what it means to stop living. To die.

That weighs on my shoulders, it's there all the time although not always at the forefront.

Simple pleasures are greater now. For several weeks, I've been carrying on about this year's fall colors to anyone who will listen. I don't recall them lasting so long or so stunningly in the past.

On Monday, driving a road through a woods to a doctor appointment, the brilliant yellows of last week had become a deep, burnt orange. I've never seen that. Or, rather, not so much of it. It makes me happy.

Sometimes I read what others have written about being terminally ill. They are all more erudite and thoughtful than I although they usually are nearer to death than I am yet (well, one doesn't really know that). Maybe I will magically become more wise as my time gets shorter. Hmmmph.

Other times I hope that when it is my turn, I will have let go enough of earthly life so to be eager for (or at least, accepting of) what comes – or doesn't come – next.

I watched this happen to my mother and to my great aunt. They gradually lost interest in the world around them. I believe I've noticed hints of this phenomenon in me recently. Just a few days ago, I deleted saved videos of two television shows I have watched regularly for many years. That evening, they just seemed dumb. They offered nothing that engaged my mind.

Although my “trip” last December with magic mushrooms (psilocybin) went a long way toward easing my bone-chilling fear of death, it is not a total relief.

Facing oblivion, the wiping away of one's unique self doesn't stop being unimaginable, and when those thoughts come to mind (they have a habit of creeping up from behind me when I'm not expecting them), I purposely dwell on them. I breathe deeply and try to make myself believe it will be all right.

You could say at this point that death and I are dating. I think we've made it to the holding hands stage. We're open to each other. We want to know more although if I'm going to anthropomorphize death, it's probably a good idea to assume that he/she already knows me well enough.

So living while dying is not all that different from living without a deadline (so to speak) which is how I think I like it. I can't be sure because I've never done this before and – damn, there are no rehearsals.

My god, this blog post is so much less than I wanted it to be. Maybe I'll give it another try down the road.

A search around the web for the phrase that is today's headline got me nowhere. (Well, I didn't try all that hard but still.)

Now I wonder if I shouldn't just credit my mother who uttered it so frequently in my childhood that I thought it was a universal truism carved in stone somewhere for all to see.

What has happened in my old age is that finally, at last and after all these 78 years of life, I realize that for all those previous decades I made life harder on myself than it needed to be.

It's not like I hadn't heard advice similar to the list below, or that if I had listened to that little voice in my head I would have known what I was doing was probably futile. But I did it anyway.

It has taken cancer, a months-long recovery from surgery and recent new limitations due to COPD for me to see there is an easier way.

So here is a partial list of good advice I ignored for too many years. I know some of them sound like platitudes but that doesn't make them wrong or unhelpful.

⏺ When things aren't going well, remember: This too shall pass.
⏺ Don't spend time worrying. It never changes outcomes.
⏺ Trust your instincts. (Unless your life has proved you shouldn't.)
⏺ Enjoy what you can do; ignore what you can't.
⏺ Remember: Most of the time things work out or, at least, don't fail catastrophically.
⏺ Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr's Serenity Prayer is always good to keep in mind:

God, grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.

⏺ Laugh long, loudly and often.

These “rules” (suggestions? advice?) are unique to me and as you undoubtedly noticed, relate mostly to control – the fact that a whole lot of what happens in life is not under my control. Which took me a lifetime to learn.

“Too young we're old, too old we're wise.” Yeah, yeah, yeah, Mom. I got it now.

Feel free to add your own life lessons, especially those you learned late in life.

What's wrong with a lot of advice for old people is that it promotes living with the same goals and interests as midlife people.

A week or two ago, Crabby Old Lady read (or heard somewhere) about a woman's aged grandmother lamenting that everyone always wants her to go somewhere and do something when her choice is to stay at home.

Crabby knows how the grandmother feels.

Part of the reason – and nobody told Crabby this would happen when she was young or even middle-aged – is that it takes so damned long these days to get ready to go anywhere. Actually, everything takes longer now and it's exhausting.

You don't even see it coming. Whether it is the due to disease, debility or simple old age, you don't realize how slow you've become until you've been slow for awhile. At least, that's what happened to Crabby.

Crabby has always had an excellent sense of time, an ability to know how long a given task will take or how much time has passed since an earlier marker. It has been so much a part of her life that she never thought it as a “thing.”

Never, that is, until one day a year ago or so when she glanced at the clock as she started washing up the lunch dishes – a plate, a cup, a knife and fork, a cooking pan – and then saw when she finished that 15 minutes had passed.

That was a three-minute task at most. So where did 12 minutes go?

It happens all the time now and it feels like someone is surreptitiously speeding up the clock when Crabby isn't looking, snatching away minutes and hours that rightly belong to Crabby.

Time speeds by so quickly that most days Crabby needs to move several items on her to-do list to the next day. And the next. And the next...

It also means Crabby would rather stay home although not for those neglected to-do items.

Crabby well remembers the many years she was out of the house from early morning until late night without any consequence – it was just a normal day.

But now she would rather be home. Not every day. Not all the time. But more than younger adults would probably find tolerable.

As is frequently mentioned in these pages, people age at different rates. Crabby is 78, diagnosed with cancer and COPD. Her energy level is about half what it once was.

Some other people her age and older might be working full time or volunteering or have places to go, things to do every day. The afflictions of old age don't catch up with all elders at the same age or to the same degree.

But they are more common in late life than not, so most old people will find themselves making age-related adjustments, large and small, than they ever planned for.

When Crabby was younger, getting out of the house and off to some new experience seemed urgent and important. But now she finds there are plenty of compelling things to do at home: read books, write a blog, talk to friends on the phone or Skype, watch a movie. Or just sit and think.

All good reasons Crabby Old Lady would rather stay home most of the time.

It's not as though the topic of today's blog post is news to anyone. Crabby Old Lady doubts there is anyone reading this who hasn't been there but that doesn't make it less irritating, even enraging.

All Crabby needed to do a few days ago was update a payee's bill payment information on her bank's website. It should have been a 30-second operation. But no. When she clicked the “enter” button onscreen, a pop-up told her the operation could not be completed and to call an 800 number for help.

Of course you know what happened next. Crabby went through four – count them, FOUR customer service representatives who, the various on-hold recordings told her, are apparently called “bankers” nowadays: “A banker will be with you shortly.”

It's anyone's guess, as far as Crabby can tell, why a “banker” would know anything about a webpage malfunction but that's how things go these days.

With various amounts of time on hold, the dreaded “I'll transfer you”, one broken connection during a transfer with each one requiring Crabby to navigate the phone tree yet again, Crabby Old Lady spent more than 45 minutes before finding a person who even understood the problem, simple as it was.

And get this: Crabby told each of the four people that she probably knew the cause of the problem: that the new name of the payee was nine words long and would not fit in the character-limited box on the screen.

After another five or ten minutes on hold, the fourth person told Crabby that she was correct, the name was longer than the character limitation allows but she had fixed the problem and it would now work.

It did.

Does a happy ending make you feel any better for having slogged through eight paragraphs of a story you know all too well?

Probably not but Crabby wanted to give you a flavor of her hour and 15 minutes on a phone call that should have taken two or three minutes.

In her old age, Crabby Old Lady finds that everything takes longer and that's not her imagination. Undoubtedly, that's true for some of you.

Crabby wears out so easily nowadays that she has no more than about six, maybe seven hours of productive time a day. All her life, Crabby was a jump-out-of-bed kind of person, eager to get going on a brand new day.

Now she lies in bed each morning, so comfy, cozy and warm, free of any kind of pain and thinks seriously about staying there. She hasn't done it yet but you never know.

With her new-ish COPD diagnosis, simple walking becomes problematic. Crabby Old Lady forgetfully starts out toward the trash bins or mailbox as if she's still in New York City at rush hour. It takes only a few steps before she is heaving for breath.

Changing the bed takes at least twice as long as all her previous life because she needs to sit down for a short rest two or three times before she's finished.

And then there are the mystery time losses such as this one: Crabby decides to wash up the few dishes in her sink and when she's done, she sees that 30 minutes (!) have gone by.

Really? It's only Crabby eating here and the dishes are few – those from lunch and maybe left over from breakfast too so it should take five minutes or so of mild effort.

What happened to those other 25 minutes?

Sometimes it happens when she is getting dressed or folding laundry or sorting the papers on her desk. Large swathes of time disappear and Crabby doesn't know where they went. Did she black out for awhile and not know it?

Crabby Old Lady was blessed with 76 healthy years of life before being diagnosed with cancer and don't think she doesn't appreciate it. But it has been so hard to adjust to living with the time demands of ongoing disease – and that's on top of the normal slowdown due to age alone..

So it time is already short in old age. When poorly trained or incompetent people can't deliver what they are paid to do so that hours go by, that is theft of Crabby Old Lady's time.

And it's not like stolen money - no one can pay back time.

Every now and then – much more frequently these days than I would ever have believed in the past – something happens in the world that is not directly related to the topic of this blog but is so important that I want to give us a chance to discuss it.

Events move so quickly these days that you might think I'm talking about the whistleblower and the U.S. House of Representatives' opening a formal impeachment inquiry into President Trump. It certainly meets my criteria for this kind of blog post.

But I haven't caught up to that yet. I'm still on climate change, on the worldwide climate strike marches last Friday and that astonishing young girl who is wise and brave beyond her 16 years, Greta Thunberg.

Listen to her fierce and powerful speech to the United Nations' Climate Action Summit in New York City on Monday. Even if you have heard it before, it's worth paying attention to again. And again.

(You can read the transcript of Ms. Thunberg's U.N. speech at NPR.)

Isn't she wonderful. In the 30 years that have passed since science made it clear that humankind is killing our only planet, have you heard any world leader match her understanding and passion and intention?

She reminds me a bit of David Hogg and his fellow students who survived the Valentines Day 2018 mass shooting at Margery Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and who are making their way through college these days while still working as gun control activists.

Ms. Thunberg inspires me. She makes me believe that we – humankind – can win the climate challenge before Earth is destroyed by it – even while I am still pessimistic.

Pessimistic about Earth's future because the leaders of the world attending the U.N. Climate Action Summit haven't offered a whit of concrete support for Ms. Thunberg's almost desperate call to action.

In an opinion piece in The Guardian, Michael H. Fuchs, noting that the United States should be leading world-wide cooperation to mitigate the effects of the climate crisis, compared Greta Thunberg and the U.S. President Trump:

”Her remarks reminded us what leadership, courage and sacrifice look like...”, Fuchs wrote.

“Trump refusing to participate in the UN climate summit was little surprise from a president who gutted domestic environmental protections, announced his intention to withdraw the US from the Paris climate agreement, and is even trying to prevent California from enacting higher emissions standards for automobiles.”

In Isaiah 11:6, the Old Testament tells us,

“The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb,
The leopard shall lie down with the young goat,
The calf and the young lion and the fatling together;
And a little child shall lead them.

In the aftermath of terrible, frightening events like shootings and climate, it does seem like it is the children, not adults, who are leading the humane response.

Ms. Thunberg, who is actually a teen, won't be a child for much longer but as far as I can tell she is working circles around the grownups who refuse to face our ultimate existential problem.

It occurs to me that if her passion were matched with the knowledge of scientists, with others who can apply the scientists' solutions and still others who can organize countries worldwide, maybe, maybe, maybe there is a chance to save the planet.

Pipe dream? I hope with all my might it is not.

Last week, former U.S. President Barack Obama called Greta Thunberg “one of our planet’s greatest advocates.” It looks like she may have arrived at the last minute but perhaps there is still time if we start soon.

While she was in New York City, Ms. Thunberg was a guest on The Daily Show with host, Trever Noah. It's worth the eight minutes of your time.

If you want to know more about Greta Thunberg, Wikipedia has some good background, and there is a 30-minute Vice documentary titled, Make the World Greta Again about her early efforts. You will find it here.

Let me say right up front that the thoughts in this post are speculative. I have not discussed them with anyone (except for you today) and it could be that there is a term for this I don't know that caused me to come up empty when I tried an internet search.

Nevertheless, it is a real and important issue in my life and I wonder if its an old people's thing more generally.

I have always kept a detailed calendar. It relieves me of trying to remember if we said we would meet on Monday or Tuesday, and it is a central place to keep notes about the items on the calendar I might otherwise misplace.

Nowadays, electronic calendars make themselves even more useful than the pre-computer paper ones with such conveniences as reminders and syncing phone to desktop. And a calendar is no less important to keeping track of my life in retirement than when I was working.

What has changed, however, is that I am older, sicker, tireder and, compared to my work years, have much less time to take care of what's necessary each day, set aside time for leisure and be sure to meet the obligations I have made with others.

Thank god for calendars.

All that is to say that I curate my time and energy via the calendar. If I have medical tests or doctor appointments, I make no other plans that day and often not the next. With travel to and from, those usually eat up three hours of the day, sometimes four.

And for some reason activities away from home are extra tiring than whatever I'm doing at home.

One of my greatest pleasures is keeping up this blog. That involves setting aside hours of time on certain days, sometimes full days, because there is never any telling how long it will take to get something written that is good enough to publish.

I rest more often than I once did. A couple of times a week, I feel the need for a nap. If not, I usually stop whatever I'm doing now and then to just sit. Sometimes to meditate, sometimes to be still and let my mind wander for awhile.

In addition to the usual household chores – cooking, cleaning up, sweeping, laundry, taking out the trash etc. - I schedule regular, long telephone calls with friends who live far away. They tend to last about an hour but three hours is not unusual either.

So on paper, I would seem to have all my ducks in a row to, within the circumstance and requirements of my age and health issues, keep daily life running smoothly.

And that's true. Except when it's not.

Although I schedule my time loosely so not to be too rigid, it is a schedule nonetheless and when I book too many appointments in a short period of time, I pay for it with increased fatigue and distraction which, of course, means things don't get done.

I might be too tired to do the grocery shopping I'd planned or if it's late in the afternoon, I can't seem to concentrate on the blog post I'm writing. When I'm that tired I even have trouble answering email sometimes.

What no one told me about being old is how long it takes to do everything and if you (well, I mean me) don't plan your time well enough, you end up getting nothing done – neither requirements nor the fun stuff.

So much to do, so little time.

So if a friend wants to reschedule a phone chat or change the day of a lunch, I'll probably wind up with a day crammed full of too many activities – it doesn't take much these days for that to happen.

There are many reasons any of us might reschedule appointments and I don't recall ever thinking much about it until the past few years. In my working years, it was no big deal; now it can throw off my energy level for two or three days.

The worst, the thing that incurs my wrath, is when someone doesn't show up. A while back, a person I hardly know, never arrived at the coffee place we had agreed to meet. After a half an hour wait, I went home, seething.

Three or four days later, I received an email saying she'd forgotten and, as though that was a normal thing to happen, suggesting we reschedule. I don't know what you would do but I hit delete.

But right now, I'm interested in the bigger picture – that after a certain age (undoubtedly different for each of us but in the same ballpark) – it is crucial to manage our energy and stamina. Oddly, too much time with people as when I have two or more appointments in a day, exhausts me even while being with people always enhances my sense of well-being.

Does any of this sound familiar? Do you schedule your time?

“What's new?” asked an old friend in an email filling me in on his latest adventures.

I was stumped, unable to think of anything new (which is probably good news for someone with cancer but not what my friend meant). I would need to think about it for awhile and in doing so, I made a list of what it is I actually do during a given week or so.

And no, I'm not going to copy out that list here. On its face, it's boring but after spending some time thinking about it, I changed my mind. Let me explain.

Among what generally passes for public thinking about life in old age are such platitudes as, “It's not the years in your life that count, but the life in your years.”

Yeah, yeah. People designated as old-age experts say things like that. They also write things like this from the U.S. National Institutes of Health website:

”Quality of life (QOL) is defined by the World Health Organization (WHO) as 'individuals' perception of their position in life in the context of the culture and value systems in which they live and in relation to their goals, expectations, standards, and concerns.'”

Whatever that means. Plus, there is always some version of the five things (or eight or 10 or any other number) people should do to make an elder's life better:

• Monitor and treat depression
• Remind seniors that they are useful and needed
• Encourage physical activity
• Encourage mental activity
• Keep them connected

Did you notice that all five are things someone is supposed to do to improve the lives of old people who, it is implied, cannot can't work this out on their own.

That is so for some elders but most of us can and there is little information to be found about old people who are not deemed deficient in one or more of the categories on that five-point list.

This happens because even among agencies and organizations whose goal is to help elders, too often there is an attitude of “If you've seen one old person, you've seen them all.”

Puh-leeze. One size does not fit all.

Nevertheless, old people are seen mostly as homogeneous, particularly when care-giving and government policy are being considered, and that filters out to everyone else.

Add to that how we become when we get old: most of us walk more slowly, we don't stay out late at night much, some of us nap more frequently and we all look the same to younger people. Just like high school – it's all about appearance.

Because of my newly diagnosed COPD, I don't do stairs anymore, I don't walk as fast or as far as I once did. I doubt I'll ever get on an airplane again. I won't drive on highways these days and I don't much like driving to new places. I don't recall last time I had dinner with friends. I can't stay awake that late so I do lunch dates instead.

And if that's all younger people know about an old person, it's a good description of a small, gray, little life. But wait.

With a book of contemporaneous maps and a marvelous book about the street (Broadway: A History of New York City in Thirteen Miles), I “walked” the entire length of world-famous Broadway from its beginnings in 1624 to the present day.

How's that for an exciting trip. I'm sure from the outside I looked like any old woman reading a book – well, in this case, two books. From the inside, I was thrilled to “see” the shops as they closed down and moved a few blocks north each time the center of Broadway gravity relocated farther uptown, and to recall which buildings are still there, buildings I have walked past or been in.

I'm currently watching a Netflix drama series about the 1970s beginnings of the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit (BSU), now renamed the Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU), as in the Criminal Minds TV series.

There are a lot of fascinating ideas, well fleshed out, about what commonalities serial killers sometimes share and if you have any wit about you, you will glean some important information about people who are not serial killers - like you and me, for example.

I regularly spend at least an hour, often stretching to two or three hours at a time, talking on the phone with friends who live far away. I can wish I were in-person with them but circumstances of life change possibilities so I do the best I can – which works out fine.

These chats are deeply nourishing to me – an old (and one new) friend's voice in my ear; news of mutual friends; in one case, an ongoing discussion on the nature of Manhattan and how it has been changing; not to mention what we have learned from books we've been reading; movies; the nature of life in general, growing old in particular. And so on.

And, of course, I write this blog. I work on it every day, for hours.

In one way, TimeGoesBy is like a journal - I can flip through past posts and see what I was thinking in the past. But in a much larger sense it is a community. There is an amazing group of smart, interesting, funny and thoughtful people who comment here.

Readers say they learn from me, but they are teachers too. I learn at least as much as they do, and many blog posts grow out of ideas readers have written in the comments. Through readers who comment, I expand my vision to the whole world.

Is this a “small, gray, little life?” I sure don't think so.

I'm doing at least as much as I did before I got old. It's just that more of it takes place in my mind, and from the outside maybe it doesn't look like much.

But I think my life is bright and shiny, full of light and color and with all that, I'm livin' large.

How about you?