Although social distancing has improved my personal interactions (avoiding people at only six feet instead of at all), it appears many of my natural inclinations are helping me do my bit to help stop the spread of coronavirus.

If being born male immediately put me on a course to mistreat women, I was quickly disabused of treading down that path by the time I reached the second grade. I will say that my instincts regarding the treatment of the opposite sex had gotten off to a most admirable start prior to that.

Carol’s attempts to get me off the couch have taken some unexpected turns. The initial rollout of chores and errands demonstrated the impregnability of my Fortress of Decrepitude. Her occasional clarion calls of “the weeds are back,” or “the car could use a wash and wax,” or “we’re out of food,” were met with a level of unresponsiveness usually associated with talking to a wall.

One afternoon Carol spotted the little frying pan and spatula that I use for breakfast on the stove. “Did you fry something for lunch?” she asked.

I would have thought that by now I’d learned how to dress myself. But Carol has shown me there’s still a lot of meat left on that bone. I’ll start with my feet.

Watching the recent Amazon Prime documentary Jacob reminded me of my own brush with a genuine polymath. I’m proud to have called him a friend as well.

I do not consider myself an adventurer, but I do admit to an impulsive nature. The two aren’t unrelated, mind you. It’s just that the adventurer winds up in a National Geographic Special, while the impulsive tends to be featured on America’s Funniest Videos or a segment of

A contingent of Carol’s family recently headed off to Portland, Oregon for the holidays. Since I had made a couple of train trips there, I was asked to recommend places to go and sights to see. As the experienced reader of this blog may have immediately discerned, I had precious little to offer. Outside of the famous Powell’s bookstore, there was the historic landmark of the city’s Union Station, which I was aware of only because that’s where I had disembarked from Amtrak. There was the homeless encampment surrounding the station, the motel with the iconic 1950s era sign, where I stayed quite cheaply, and a sports bar near a strip joint that had been located within walking distance from the train station.

“Goodness, it’s already quarter to ten,” Carol recently observed one morning. Yes, my love, time flies, I replied with my inner voice, especially when we don’t get out of bed until quarter to nine. I didn’t see the need to call attention to the lateness of the morning that we’d finally slithered out of bed. In our defense, it was an unusually late a.m. hour to get up, given that we’d gone to bed around that time the previous p.m. Needless to say, retirement has been one of the easiest “life events” which I have embraced with the enthusiasm and energy of… a three-toed sloth.

I recently got a new eyeglass prescription. Two things had happened to my eyeballs. All of a sudden, I needed reading glasses, first for ingredient labels and the small print on prescription bottles, and then for reading regular text. The second thing was that I could see farther better without my previous near-sighted correction than with it. Thinking this trend might be leading to x-ray vision, I put off a visit to the optometrist for awhile. When I finally made the appointment, the doctor casually told me that it was normal for vision to flip from near-sighted to far-sighted, “especially as we age.” My dream of x-ray vision in time for the summer beach season was dashed upon an horizon I could now see more clearly, even without glasses.