Today being one of the last of eight days before my 65th birthday I find that I am feeling more than entirely cranky. All my separate molecules and particularities are shouting at me, with my fingers in my ears: "THIS is OLD!" "THIS one TOO!"
But I remain firmly locked in my denial. Me? Old? No way. No need to shout about it, just a resolute refusal to register the facts, thanks.

The signs are all there, though:

There is, by way of the most obvious example, just about no one on the planet that I want to talk to at any length.

When a young person driving erraticly pulls up behind me in the drive-through banking outlet, especially one who begins to sound her horn immediately upon taking her place in line, I do not hesitate to get out of my car and ask her if her mother trained her to be rude or is she a free lance agent of the local Gross Out Your Elders By Showing Extremely Bad Breeding Squad.

These younger creatures seem to believe the world has become their Instant Gratification Factory. It comes, I suppose, of our all being captives in this computer-driven society's webs of deceit.


If you were to see me in the corner market or the video store, however, you would find that I am as courteous as the next person. Meanwhile, underneath that tissue-thin surface of civility I am a quivering rather wrinkled and permanently mussed mass of my own version of 21st Century unamused, seriously dementable disgruntlement.

It's not just that there are terrorists everywhere, if we are to believe those who have the most to gain by opening and staffing more greed pits of commercial despond. Also even as larger and increasingly invasive prices of automotive fuel has gone entirely out of sight here in the U.S. I am informed by a European friend that we have it much better than we realize since there the gallon is going for ten to eleven dollars American Equivalent in Euros.

All my favorite old friends are either far flung, weakened by their years or dying off at steady increments.

Take my most highly valued role model, Alison McMaugh. She is worthy of separate consideration among the world's rumble-up and tumble-down crowding hordes. But she left us this January, so there's no taking her any more she has been taken back by her Creator, it seems.

Today, July 20th, I am in receipt of an invitation to exhibit a piece or two of my work by my former art prof (the newly widowed husband of Australian-born painter Alison McMaugh)who will be showing in December in a nice-sized, cooperative gallery not more than an hour or so away to the east of where I live. This is a pleasant little surprise amid the flurry of bummers in the atmosphere of late.