Tracking Change

Does everyone think about recording significant events, or is the notation instinct peculiar to writers?

When I found my first gray hair, when I saw the first indisputable age-related wrinkle on my face — these and other signs I thought I should write down. It would be interesting to trace the process of aging, perhaps to mark ones progression toward finality to prove that being here mattered, that one was alive the entire time and did not slip away without awareness.

Or to bear down hard when forming words for the sheer unbelievability of turning from a luscious, beautiful, lithe girl into a gray-haired, flabby, scarred and bruised, achy adult. Whose brilliant idea was this? Someone on the committee seems to have dropped the ball, because the follow up on this project appears to be going to hell without even the courtesy of a hand basket!

Obviously, I did not compile in a diary my progression along life's timeline or I could have avoided the phrase "and other signs" above. Had I journaled each incident, however, it's unlikely I'd be able to find the tome. Change has forced bits of my life into anonymous boxes too numerous to catalog. Electronic media is no friend of the passage of time either. Disks no longer physically fit the devices they were created to "back up." (I have boxes of diskettes and tapes and zips and orbs, too. Why?)

Thursday morning about 11, as I served the computer god that generates my livelihood, I was unable to remove some piece of fuzz attached to my right eyelashes. Even a bath with extra rinses didn't clear the buggers from dashing across my field of vision as I continued my day; though I thought they lessened.

I'd heard the term floaters but was uncertain what they were. Nevertheless I Googled "eye floaters." Turns out, that's what the random dark shapes that move with my right eye are. Shadows of something going on in the back of the eyeball. Funny little things, I can't see them by looking at them, but only by not looking at them, because they move when I move my eye.

I learned they are age-related. Great! Unless they settle out of my line of vision, a possibility, I will live the rest of my life looking through the equivalent of glasses that cannot be cleaned.

There. I wrote it down.