Hey you,

Greetings from Poughquag. It’s just past seven on a rainy Thursday on the teetering verge of frost. I imagine the foliage hunkering down, stiffening, jutting their jaws this time of year as they prepare for winter’s onslaught. Each day stiffer, more browns, desperate defections as they ready their hopeless defiance. They remind me of moribunds in their final throes or the poor pummeled Ukrainians.

You ask how I am. I wish I knew. “Couldn’t be better” – the conventional response – is true as far as it goes. My health is sturdy for my age; Jane’s almost mended after her year of orthopedic hell; furry Henry’s warming my feet like a lap robe (I remember lap robes!). No complaints – and if I did complain, with my luck, I should be shot. Grumpy oldsters are an abominable subset of the human mix: be glad or be gone!

I am inordinately – spillingly, almost weepingly – grateful for my particulars, propped here on my work-bed, pen ploughing my page, alert, attentive (feet warm), the silence singing. Here’s the life I dreamt for myself during my bustling bruising days but never believed possible. Where would I find the respite, peace, love?

So “by all means” – does anybody use that phrase anymore: “by all means”? – I “couldn’t be better.” Yet I am sad, too, my soul “disquieted within me” (Psalm 42), uneasy, to my profound surprise. Not for myself – our selves, like the leaves, brace for winter – but for our kind. It feels as if humanity is slip-sliding to our perdition at an accelerating pace. Wars, incivility, truthlessness, environmental rapine, our obdurate unconcern for each other, suffuse me with dread, not for a million years hence, beyond the reach of my concern, but for any day now, dooming lives I love. For myself I’ve no fears – we have lived our lives – our summons tomorrow would be no surprise – but don’t those lithe lively lovely little ones deserve their time in the sun! What have they done to be penalized with such predecessors!

Such apocalyptic apprehension is a recurrent feature of our species. (Henry, for whom the future’s fantastic, rolls his eyes at my fussing.) It could result from getting old, as strength declines. But I cannot shake it. I keep thinking of the dinosaurs’ hundred and fifty million years of global supremacy and humans’ less than two million; of the dizzying rate of change, so generations feel barely related; of the degradation of our planetary patrimony; of our pride, which blinds us to our destructive might; of what will happen to Shakespeare, Mozart, et al., when our species goes the way of the dinosaurs; of what I might do, with my pipsqueak powers, to forestall this fate.

You smile at such carrying on. Me too. Why not kick back, accept winter’s dominion – over the species no less than the individual? Why put up a fight? What is born must die, what begins ends, wisdom relents, relishes, be glad!

That is my sermon to myself. But joy is easier to commend than to command. Reason doesn’t rule my dreams. I wake many mornings in a fret – and sweat – at the incredible idiocy of our kind. What sort of omnipotent authority made humans so smart and stupid at the same time! Religions typically congratulate themselves for being some divinity’s boffo idea, just shy of the angels. The more I ponder – and retirement lavishes me with time for pondering – the more we humans resemble a botched experiment – or sick joke.

Sorry for unloading. It’s the quiet, warmth, those hapless leaves, Henry toasting my toes. Letters permit effusions emojis preclude.