Two different friends helped me walk down stairs yesterday.  Both let me set the tone.  I teased Sheldon Vogt early in the afternoon, Don’t grab my arm or we’ll both go over sideways!  He said, You just tell me what you need.  I smiled as I put my hand on his forearm.  You’re so smart to say that, I remarked.  I’ve told many people, ‘If it doesn’t help, it isn’t “help” ‘.

Later in the evening, Dan Ryan escorted me down our host’s front porch after our Rotary Board meeting.  He first tried to take my arm, then adjusted as I took his instead.  Just do whatever works, he assured me.  Then we swapped stories of people falling in the street.  I didn’t hear the end of his story about a mutual friend because it reminded me of once when I called another friend of ours to come scrape me from the driveway.

In contrast, last week someone admonished me for the amount of files that I carried for myself to and from my north office.  I shrugged, since nothing could be done except to carry them myself.  I haven’t a handmaid scampering after me.  In the same spirit, I knelt on the floor this morning to fish for something which had rolled beneath a piece of furniture.  Daring move for me but I got back on my feet, a little shaky though not much the worse for the experience.

From time to time, I’ve resented people who want to assist.  I go through months of forging forward wearing a forbidding scowl.  Suddenly my mood swings; I huddle in a rocking chair wondering how I will get through another day.  Piles of unwashed laundry, stacks of books, crooked cabinets, straggling shrubbery.  All beyond me.

In a perfect world, on a crystal golden day, the pendulum stills itself squarely in the middle ground. I reach out.  A hand meets me.  Halfway.

It is the eleventh day of the twenty-fifth month of My Year Without Complaining.  For some of us, life continues.

RIP  – DAVID BOWIE

David Robert Jones (8 January 1947 – 10 January 2016)

THE STARS LOOK VERY DIFFERENT TODAY.