This morning, my neighbor, Rosa, was out fussing around on her porch, getting ready for summer, and all of us who sit there in the mornings to drink our coffee, and say the same things we did the day before.  Her daughter, Elena, and her angelic-looking granddaugher, Rose, were visiting.  I asked Elena how her Easter had been.

"Oh, fine, fine...I’m so poor, though, that I had to dye one egg, and just keep hiding it over and over again...."  She was kidding, of course, but that cracked me up.  "She’s only four!  What does she know?"

"Rosa, I came over because I’m baking bread again tomorrow, and I wanted to know if you’d like a loaf or two."  Rosa looked at me like I had just asked her if I could poke her in the eyes with a pointy stick.

"That’s all I need.  MORE fat."  She shook a towel at me.  "It’s people like you who make it so hard for me to lose weight!"  She drew herself up to her full height (about five feet nothing) and frowned at me.

"Oh, for heavens’ sake, Rosa - let yourself go a little.  You’ve been eating rice cakes and drinking diet soda for the four years I’ve known you, and you look exactly the same as the day we met.  You’re healthy - who cares if you’re a little fluffy as well?"

She rolled her eyes and said, "Yes, of course, I want a loaf of fresh-baked bread...I’ll get that faster than I’ll get the butt I had when I was twenty, I guess."

Yes, that’s how it goes...but I’m glad I can eat a slice of fresh bread just slathered in butter and jam without worrying if I can skinny into a pair of tight jeans anymore.  The train keeps on running - there’s just a bit more caboose, that’s all!

I don’t know what I expected from life, but it certainly wasn’t what it has turned out to be.  It’s been, as the Grateful Dead tell us, one hell of a long, strange trip, hasn’t it?  One of my earliest memories (other than ones I share with my family) was the day John F. Kennedy died, and the young nun who came into the classroom that day who could barely speak for the tears, and - since then - even I can hardly believe all that has happened.

I can’t believe all that’s happened to ME, either.  Not the things I’ve done, the people I know, or when I first noticed that my mother was wearing my clothes and looking at me in my mirror.  I wish I could say that it’s been an extraordinarily happy life, but it hasn’t.  It has been a wild ride, though - I can never say that I’ve spent much time being bored.

Part of this journal is for me to have a place to record some of those things.  Part of it is just to vent because the world has gone all wonky on us, and it’s pretty frightening.  Part of it is because, after all I’ve done, I don’t understand hardly any of it.  I can’t remember who it was - Spinoza?  Jung? - but they said, "Man spends the first forty years living his life.  He spends the last forty trying to understand it."  Perhaps I have lots and lots of company?