You know I like a good laugh at my own expense. Well, I find it pretty funny that ever since the New Year I've been living in Sean's track pants. I'm no fashion monger, but this is much further than I'd usually go, even within the confines of my home. And yet, here I am...

I've always embraced my elderly tendencies. Somewhere in the family albums is a picture of me dressed up as an old woman for halloween. Painstakingly needlepointed into my childhood Christmas stocking is an image of Mrs. Claus that reminded me fondly of my grandmother. I've always loved eating dinner early and going to bed early. I even wrote a poem once with the line "I'm going to be what they already see/a bitchy old lady of twenty-three."

But now in comes the new year with a fresh supply of old. In the last week or so I've come across at least three people who knew my name and I had no idea who they were. All I could manage were vague half-graspable memories of their voices, hair or smiles. I've since discovered who two of them are. The others continue to nag my swiss-cheese brain.

And then there's the track pants. If I had my own velour leisure suit, I certainly would have been wearing that instead. In the last week I've managed to acquire and largely recover from an ailment seen mostly in people over 60 (let's leave it at that. It's both better and worse than you imagine). And so I've been housebound, slipper-bound. Old, old, old.

Maybe I'm getting it out of the way now. Maybe I'll grow charmingly childlike in my golden years and not simply because I've got Alzheimer's. It could happen, right? It could.