Time is a terrible thing to waste

This is in the nature of being a confession. (Note: I am even equivocating on the subject matter). So let me just come clean. This is a confession. I have been a lazy bum for almost a week.

For ninety years, I was an industrious little bee, bed-ridden or not. At 91, I caved ( temporarily, I hope) and just laid back and closed my eyes at every available opportunity. I know I am of an age when I can forget chores, and goals, and deadlines, but I have lived too long with a to-do list to be suddenly faced with a blank note bad. It is bad for the mind and worse for the soul.

Last Friday night, after I dozed through Washington Week, I didn't know what to do with myself. My son had sent me a stack of wonderful books for my birthday, and I felt too dumb to start reading them. I'm not talking Proust (I've always been too dumb to really understand him); I'm talking Alter and Remnick; wonderful writers I thoroughly enjoy. So, I firgured I'd watch an old NCIS.

My brother had told me, a few years ago, that these are good episodes to kill an hour. To kill time... ( kill time!) horrors, that is a punishable infraction. It worked, and I fell in love with Mark Harmon, my new friend, " Leroy Jethro Gibbs". It's like pistachio nuts, you know you can't eat just one pistachio nut. If you don't get that, it's because it is an inside joke--Abbie and Gibbs and mine.

Well, I watched an episode I had watched twice before, where the Iranian mother-in-law and Mike, Gibbs' mentor, sit on the same deck and watch their joint grandchild playing with her mother.

Three viewing of that is only one too many--- but here I am, back in the land of the living.

Thank the good Lord. Blessed be.