As I have aged I find that my interests have changed radically. I have more questions and fewer answers. Football (brutality) has become less interesting, baseball (strategy) more interesting. Artwork is more interesting. Sculpture. Photography. Nature is astonishing. Books are often less interesting. I don't like wasted storylines or mindless descriptions. I have this idea that writers could describe things in numbing detail only when it is essential to moving the plot, and readers should be hungry for those details. I want to rip the page over to see what is on the next page. I find myself reading the first sentence of a paragraph and then skipping to the next first sentence, thinking who cares about this?

I saw that the hubble telescope has lost its primary camera and that even though a repair mission is going that way next year, the camera is too difficult a repair to be attempted. So a window has gone dark to the universe. Will there ever be anything like it again? I saw a giant coffeetable book of Hubble photos in Barnes and Noble the other morning. Did I tell you about the trip to Barnes and Noble in Savannah? Very weird. It was 9 a.m. and all the mall stores were closed, yet there were 75 cars in front of Barnes and Noble? We went in to find there was no special event, but people were everywhere. The Hubble photos are astonishing images and then in fine print it says that from one side of the photo to the other is a span of 150 million light years. Now how can I get my mind around that? Did you see the images in the space trip part of the movie Contact? Hubble images look like that, or visa versa. Can there ever be any way to travel or even communicate across these distances? Is it possible that people are out there everywhere, but that no human will ever see any of them. Are we even short timers on our own planet? Will something annihilate us all and a new civilization of creatures rise to study our civilization in 40 million years? When I walk the dog at night and look up I feel very small. It makes you wonder what is important? Goodness, pleasure, a future life, nothing? I guess everyone has to keep doing what they "feel" is right. The musicians will keep making music, the engineers designing, the artists painting, the athletes playing, the preachers preaching.

As I get older, it is more difficult to decide what is important. Maybe it is only finding meaningful personal relationships and sharing joy. The earth is a little island in the universe that is safe for us to do that on. How odd.