When Did Bill Clinton Get So Old?

I write a blog post every morning as a form of mental exercise. It keeps me in the know, reminds me that I was once a paid columnist, enlarges my vocabulary and staves off Alzheimer's, at least according to some experts in the field. Plus it's fun, at least once I get going. The hard part is deciding what to write about, and usually a topic presents itself with little or no effort--but not always. Today I'm stumped.

First I toyed with writing about a debilitating bug bite I got yesterday, and yes, I said debilitating. I had gone swimming just down the road in the Casco Bay, and while drying off was approached, and then attacked, by one of Maine's nastiest denizens known as "green flies," not to be confused with "black flies" which are also no picnic. The bite of the green fly hurts when you first get it, but afterwards it's much worse--almost a day later, my right leg is morphing into a telephone pole. Poor me! Then I read an email from a friend who is about to undergo a kidney transplant in a few days. Things have not gone smoothly during the pre-op phase, and she will have to be in isolation for six to eight weeks following the surgery, and the inept organ donor coordinator is causing added stress, and suddenly my silly little fly bite seemed like a pathetic thing not worth a hoot.

Then I read Peggy Noonan's column in today's Wall Street Journal about how Bill Clinton is set to speechify bigtime at the upcoming Democratic National Convention, thereby injecting the party with some much-needed adrenaline. That's a great subject, I thought, about how Obama is calling on his former rival to rescue him from political quicksand, but in her column Peggy calls Clinton "that ol' man, with his white hair and reading glasses," and I was plummeted into a deep depression; he is exactly my age! I still never think of myself as old, and yet there was his picture in the paper right in front of me and he looked like, well, like an old, white-haired man with reading glasses. I decided against that.

So now I have no topic to explore and think I will just go for a walk. I'd go for a run except, because I'm exactly Bill Clinton's age, I have arthritis in my hip. And that fly bite on my leg really hurts, dammit, even though my kidneys still work. I think a great blog post would be about how when we compare ourselves to others, our own lives seem either better or worse, depending. Maybe tomorrow.