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beyond their babymaking years
Friday, December 14 2007
I had my first real exercise in over a month this morning as I shoveled out the driveway. This was the first time I'd shoveled snow since I experienced my increase in eye floaters, and it was a little jarring to see all those tiny fragments of cellular detritus floating across the brightly-lit target of my snowshovel attack. In daily life one doesn't have too many reminders of one's microbial origins, but when they come they're always a bit disheartening. How can anyone believe he's a special creation of a deity when he can clearly see the bodies of his own ancestors floating across his field of view?
This evening three of Gretchen's friends came over for dinner, all women in their late 50s and early 60s. Having lost most of our contemporaries to the demands of child rearing, we find ourselves socializing with people who are beyond their babymaking years. Gretchen made another of her elaborate meals, this one featuring chili, macaroni & vegan glurp, and collars that our neighbor Andrea brought over. In addition to the visitors, there were also two canine visitors, causing all but one of the cats to hide out upstairs. Wilma, who has voluntarily restricted her habitat to downstairs socializing space, had nowhere to go but the back of the couch, where she would respond with hisses to the overtures of Oliver the Labradoodle.
At some point I noticed that the fire I was stoking in the woodstove had raised the temperature of the living room to eighty degrees.
Inevitably towards the end of one of these social dinners I start feeling agitated and bored, and I find it both polite and useful to direct this energy to the task of washing dishes, which (aside from housecleaning) is usually my only contribution to the hosting effort. As I washed dishes tonight, the women discussed the vexing subject of how time seems to accelerate as one grows older. I broke my silence to suggest that this probaly has something to do with the way we compare time to our personal pasts. Because of the finite capacity of memory, our past always seems like an unchanging quantity even while it is constantly increases. Thus the addition of a year in early childhood seems to take a long time, since it represents a huge proportional increase in an individual's past. When someone is eighty, though, a year represents a negligible expansion to that past.
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