Acting my Age

On Thursday I celebrate my seventieth birthday.  Sitting here on an early Monday morning, in the afterglow of a fantastic weekend where I got to celebrate with friends and relatives who share this birth month, I'm struck by how strange it is to be old without feeling it.  Sure there are the various arthritic joints that need a little more wake up time than they used to, but damn I feel great!

Saturday's soiree featured the music of Big Joe Fitz and the LoFis, a truly great local group.  We commandeered Unison's gallery and performance space for the day and added food catered by Mark Suszczynski.  The assemblage included, to my great surprise, my son and his family who flew up from southern Louisiana for the weekend, and my two stepdaughters, one from Rochester, NY and the other from Baltimore, who drove in to share the day with me.

This birthday week is crammed: with rehearsals for the play "Nothing means Nothing" that we'll be performing Friday night at Unison, meetings with potential board members (did I mention that I'm president of Unison's Board of Directors?), workouts at the gym, writing time, reading time, and ticking items off my "Honey Do List".   I think I'm too busy to feel old.

But right now the day has just barely begun.  It's not yet seven am.  My cat, Elvis, is snoring, snuggled against my leg as I sit in bed writing this.  This strange winter weather continues to be strange - my impression as I went outside to extract the morning paper from its orange delivery tube, was of an early spring morning, not a winter one.  I've seen winters with little snow before, but they were still winters, with subfreezing daytime temperatures and single digit temps at night.  This one has mostly been days in the forties and nights in the twenties.  That's not winter.

The radio is playing the song I know as "The Skaters Waltz"; Carol is reading emails on her computer and coughing from a new cold; I am thinking about having another cup of coffee before I start the day.