Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.– Franz Kafka

We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing. George Bernard Shaw

I turned Eighty-Five in June of 2025 CE, and it was my roughest birthday yet. For years, I’ve thought of myself as a much younger person than my actual age. If I had a physical problem – and I’ve had a lot of physical problems – I sort of thought about it as something that could be fixed, a repair like a leaking radiator on a car. Fix the leak and zoom away. Even then, when I really think about it, I knew I was getting old, but not really…old.

A couple of months before my birthday, I fell on a wet flight of stairs, breaking a little bone in my hand, from which my hand is still numb. At about the same time as my birthday, I had my first of two cancer surgeries, two cataract surgeries, which made it difficult to read, and a major problem with my jaw that is probably arthritis related. All this over a background of arthritis that is getting worse. It is not the first time that I’ve felt old, but the first time I’ve felt chronically old. I feel like I’ve become obsessed with ageing and its associated degradation of my body and mind.

To add to that, I lost, left really, my phone in a cab in Paris, and it is now tied up in French Customs. I don’t consider myself a big phone user, but I really miss it. Then our house phone battery failed, so I felt completely isolated. I thought I did, that is, until my computer’s hard drive started freezing and I lost my email connection.

I probably will not find out if I’m cancer-free for a while, and even if I am now cancer-free, I will have six weeks of chemotherapy to be sure. On the plus side, I passed my driver’s vision test, and I can now read the New Yorker’s cartoons without glasses. We have a new house phone with the same number but no saved numbers of other people. I now have a new 2-TWO-terabyte hard drive, which is pitched as being faster and more reliable than my old drive.

Meanwhile, back in Paris, we went to a David Hockney show in a museum designed by Frank Gehry.