28 January 2018

Here we are, my wife April and I, back in Yelapa for our 13th stay in this village just down the coast from Puerto Vallarta. Arrived here at the end of December, the day after my 83rd birthday, and plan to remain until around the 20th of April when we'll go to Detroit for April's father's 100th birthday before returning to our home outside Nelson, BC.

I doubt very much I'll make it to my father-in-law's very advanced age; not sure I even want to, though his abiding alertness is amazing. He sleeps a lot, his short-term memory grows ever shorter, but he's still reading, still thinking, still acquiring knowledge, still content to be alive.

I recently read an interview with Philip Roth, who in his mid-80s claims to have retired from writing. He hasn't, of course, retired from reading, nor from thinking, and what he says about his old age and the approach of the inevitable that awaits us all certainly resonates with me. He goes to bed at night, he says, grateful to have had the day, and wakes up the next morning thankful to be starting another. That's basically it for us folks who have made it beyond the biblical three score and ten.

Unlike Roth, I'm still writing in my mid-80s, though also unlike him I have virtually nothing to show for all the years I've been writing -- some 60 years, starting in 1956 when as a Navy sailor I started sending out stories and within a couple of years actually published a few in obscure and now vanished magazines.

How time has gotten away from me. How much time I've wasted in my long life. Still . . .

Hope springs eternal.