Countdown

Since I have so few newsworthy topics to write about, today’s blog will be devoted entirely to the latest details of my Countdown.

I seem to be sleeping longer than I did not so long ago, like for ten or eleven hours. And I seem to be looking forward to sleeping. Ten o’clock arrives and I can hardly wait to climb into bed. It’s almost as though I want each day to end and the next day to begin so that I can get to the end of that day. In other words, I seem to be marking time until something happens. Death? Maybe. A regaining of some health and stamina? Probably not. Each of our days is becoming too much the same lockstep routine—arise at 8:30 or 9:00 (more often 9:00 or later than 8:30), make coffee, bring in the Arizona Republic, take morning pills with orange juice, check the sports section, check the obituaries to see how many my age or younger have died, have a muffin or a piece of toast. Paper, done. Muffin, done. Coffee done. Then I hope that the PGA or LPGA is on or possibly an early afternoon Diamondbacks game. If no sports are available, I write a blog or catch up on letters or read one of the many e-books  on my IPad. Then, finally . . . blessedly, it’s cocktail hour, after which we have a simple dinner as we watch Lester Holt and the NBC Evening News to learn what new stupid things Trump has said or done. Then we watch whatever is on the tube or whatever we’ve saved until the magical 10:00 p.m. arrives and we can go to bed . . . to hurry to another day too terribly similar to the one just ended.

          Weight loss. As my appetite diminishes, my weight keeps dropping to levels I never thought possible. This morning, I tipped the scale at 159. Looking back to my youth, I think I probably weighed more than that when I was fourteen or fifteen. What will happen if this weight loss continues? Will I one day just disappear in a little puff of smoke? Or will I, like Benjamin Button, keep getting younger and younger and smaller and smaller until I disappear into my mother’s womb? Gadzooks! Such metaphysical questions.

          Although I have no way to give it a numerical value, less and less activity for me requires more and more rest time. Now, whenever I get up from my bed or chair to do anything . . . ANYTHING . . . after only a few minutes I have to collapse into a chair panting and wheezing like I’d just crossed the finish line in the Boston Marathon. Each day that passes sees me incrementally more exhausted than the day before. I now ride in an electric cart at the grocery store. I’m thinking about buying a wheel chair for conveyance on my rare times out of the house, but should it be a self-wheeling chair or an electric? If I had to turn the wheels myself, would I have enough energy to do it?

          And each day the Countdown gets closer and closer to midnight.