A thing I like about being old (I consider myself "early-old"):
I don't mind feeling foolish, or out of step. I expect I don't look as foolish as I feel; or, anyway, no one cares if I'm foolish, as long as I don't get in their way.
Moving heavy stuff (including my body) feels good.
I dragged a loaded sled across the gym parking lot and back again. It's gratifying, satisfying to make something move, even for no other reason than to move it.
2. BELOW:
Yesterday, Independence Day, I volunteered at the Women's Prison Book Project, fulfilling requests (three free books each) from women and trans people incarcerated around the United States (lots in Texas...). I volunteered there once before, before Covid.
Many people
write saying their prison has no library. (Women's prisons are often less equipped than men's, not that all men in prison have access to books either.)
Mr. Furniture at work, who spent ten years in prison, calls the Fourth of July, "the Fourth of They-lied".
It helps to know books so you can fulfill the request with what's on hand. I did a good job with that, due to my work.
I wish I could volunteer every week, but they limit the number of people in the space during Covid (and they require everyone to wear masks and be vaccinated), and shifts for the rest of July are filled up.
(Everyone who works there is a volunteer, including the regulars who run the project.)
Published in 1949, it's about a guy in San Francisco––Isherwood Williams––one of the few survivors of a new virus that wipes out most humans.
(It's an odd coincidence that I'm also reading C. Isherwood's diaries from the same era in Los Angeles.)
It's very good so far (p. 49)––smart, and not embarrassingly out of date like a lot of pulp sci-fi from that era.
It's spookily prescient---or, you could say, predictably prescient? There are only so many ways human diseases work and humans react.
I like the reactions Stewart chooses to present---they remind me of what I've seen the past year and a half of our Covid pandemic. Some bad behavior, sure, but a lot of people trying to be decent (even if they did buy up all the toilet paper). The main character sees:
"Civilization, the human race––at least, it seemed to have gone down gallantly. Many people were reported as escaping from the cities, but those that remained had suffered, as far as he could make out from the newspaper a week old, no disgraceful panic. Civilization had retreated, but it had carried its wounded along, and had faced the foe.He reports various points of view, including that a "crusty old sage had commented, 'Man has been growing more stupid for several thousand years; I myself shall waste no tears at his demise.'"
"Doctors and nurses had stayed at their posts, and thousands more had enlisted as helpers. Whole areas of cities had been designated as hospital zones. All ordinary business had ceased, but food was still handled on an emergency basis.
"Even with a third of the population dead, telephone service along with water, light, and power still remained in most cities. In order to avoid intolerable conditions ... the authorities were enforcing strict regulations for immediate mass burials."