It's 11:30 at night.  Karen just made her last appearance in the kitchen before bed.  "We're getting old," she declared before heading off to bed.

I hardly need any reminding.  I had been thinking of the time when the office staff laughed uproariously when I was told to pick up the phone and talk to my daughter Emily.  Two lights were blinking on the phone and I thought she was on line one.  I picked up the receiver.   "Hi babe!"  I said cheerily into the phone.

"Excuse me?"  Came the confused response.  Not Emily.  The word "flabbergasted" doesn't do justice to what I felt as I groped for words.

"Oh, you're not Emily!  Well, never mind.  You never heard me, and I wasn't here!"  I exclaimed, putting her on hold.

Somehow, the whole office had been listening in on my conversation.  They exploded into gales of laughter.

The poor lady on the other end got lost in the shuffle and hung up.  It was an hour before she called back.  When I came back from lunch, there were four messages waiting for me on the machine from staff with disguised voices having a jolly time at my expense.

I figure that it's better to tell such stories on oneself than to suffer the knowing smirks of people as one walks past.  Anyway, it helps me illustrate the point that we're growing old.

Another case in point: I just spent five minutes looking for a magazine that I wanted to read tonight.  "Where did I put that thing?!"  I thought.  Turns out I had set it on the bed and Karen had set it on the floor - OK, I'm not going senile.  But still, there was some doubt there.  I've spent far too much time looking for stuff that I had no business forgetting about.  Yesterday, for example, I was leaving for the car in the morning.  I had wanted to take a banana for lunch.  I had a bunch of stuff in my arms. "Where did I put that banana?"  I asked with exasperation.

"It's in your hand," Karen replied.

No, I'm not having a crisis.  But I do live my life in the shadow of 1 Peter 1:24, "All men are like grass, and their glory is like the flowers of the field; the grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of the Lord stands forever."