I don’t think there’s any recent event that’s had had such an emotional impact on me as the fires. They have reminded me, for one example, that I remember dinosaurs.

Remembering dinosaurs–in my case, the Shell Beach brontosauraus–for someone about to turn seventy-three, means that death doesn’t carry the freight it had when I was twenty-three, about when I saw the actor John Houseman in the film “Paper Chase.”

The fires reminded me that John Donne was right:

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;…

This is an old man’s hand. That’s not the centerpiece of this blog post, which is about hope and remembrance.

I have noticed, too, the kind of crepe-y skin that the actress Jane Seymour deplores is starting to appear on the undersides of my forearms, and on my borther Bruce’s. Shoot howdy, I rememer Seymour as Kate, the incredibly evil lover of Adam Trask in the miniseries East of Eden. She wone a Golden Globe, more power to her, becuase I despised her.

Her lover/husband, Adam Trask, was played by Timothy Bottoms. To show you how slyly the years have paaaed, Elizabeth and I enjoy immensely an AnimalPlanet show about Bottoms’s son, Buckeye, now a vet in Hawaii. He has all of the compassion that Kate lacked. And he adores his Pittie cross, who goes with him everywhere.

Buckeye’s Pop was the star in another generational film, The Paper Chase, about Harvard Law, whose pivot was the incredible actor/director John Houseman, imperiorus as Timothy Bottoms’s torts professor. (“Bottoms’s” is a peculiar construction, isn’t it?) And Bottoms ahd the great good luck to fall in lvoe with Lindsey Wagner, his torts professor’s daughter and later The Bionic Woman.

You would think, wouldn’t you? You would think that this blog will be filled with self–pity? You would be right, because I have a lot of that trait, in addition to the aging hands. I used to remember the names of the horses of virtually every general in the Civil War. Now I can’t rember the name of the actress in Alien. (It was Sigourney Weave.) I get my facts wrong far, far more tha I used to.(San Luis Obispo muscian Louie Ortega never played for Whale’s Knees, I was bluntly and correctly informed. I keep making my big siter a year olde than she really is. The declination of my night vision means that I get lost on Elm Street in Arroyo Grande, when I look anxiously for the big lights that illuminate the shopping center where I worked, at Kinney’s Shoes, fifty-five years ago.

And then there’s this.

This is part of my workout yesterday, and I’m proud of it, but it’s faint echo my twenties, I benched 200 lbs with reps–when I was a wee fellao— went shopping in SLO for polo shirts whose sleeves would stretch because my bicps strained them. I was a hunka hunk.

And I was a flaming asshole.

I will be seventy-three this month. Now it takes me a full minute to shift from my left to my right side in bed. (Someimes I have to shift Walter the Basset Hound first, which is roughly equivalnet to benching 200 lbs.) When I’m awake and more or less conscious, everything hurts. The distanc between me an dthe quarter I dropped on the kitchen floor seems just a bit farther than the distance between Oxnard and Arroyo Grande.

When I have to show my ID for groecery shopping, I like to joke that “I was around when dinosaurs roamed the Earth.” Which I was, if some of you remember the Shell Beach Brotosaurus.

No, just in case you were waiting for me to feel sorry for myself, here just a few things I rmember from my impossibly long time on this here Planet Earth. And the wrinkles on that old, old hand? They make me very happy. Even the cheesy ones, which remind me that the one thing—maybe the only thing— I’m not afraid of is dying. Not that I’m in a hurry, mind you.

I remeber the first video; I adore the second, and there’s nothing I loved teaching quite so much as the third.

So there. Death be not be proud. You don’t scare me. Not one damned bit.