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12/13/2003: "Aging"

There is nothing like an old friend. I have lots of them and they are, mostly, new old friends. I've known them only a few years, and they are well into the fourth quarter-century of their lives. They are vigorous, wise, humble, interesting and friendly, almost without exception; but the fact that they will not retain all of those qualities much longer lends a certain poignancy to the love I have for them. It is love, racing against the clock. We imagine ourselves to be independent when we cannot see those on whom we depend. We imagine ourselve to be important when we are paid to go somewhere and work every day. We imagine ourselves to be invulnerable because we have not been laid low by illness. My old friends no longer believe in these lies, and the truth has set them free. Even as the sand runs from the hourglass, they rejoice in what remains.

Today we sold cookies to raise money for the Adult Day Center, SHADC. The cookies, thousands and thousands of them, sold out in less than two hours, most of them gone in the first forty minutes. A loving gift from my old friends, to their old friends.