NOTES FROM THE NINTH DECADE 

 

 

 It's 4 AM and I find myself thinking about the timeline of my life. How over the years my personal world would suddenly expand in incremental bursts. The first 18 years were spent getting ready for whatever would follow. Suddenly my world expands with college and medical school, and I find myself more than I was before, living in a new community with new friends and new interests. Before I can get fully settled, it falls apart and I am thrust into another life, enlarging my personal world once again and revealing another aspect of the person that I am. Years later my life makes one more major change and I’m living in still another world. Each move, each change over the 82 years has grown the circle of my personal world. Those that have passed are still here in memories and long-standing personal remnants. Today my world is and once again changing, only now it seems to be receding, contracting under the weight of 85 years. Probably a natural course of events and not necessarily a bad thing. It allows me to focus my attention on what is important, discarding so many unnecessary distractions.