Getting old, feeling his strength diminishing, thinking more in the past than the future, seeing my friends disappear one by one ...

Seeing the youth stand up to leave their seats when I boards a bus ...

Seeing my hair in the mirror becoming more and more white,

No longer be able to run as long and as fast as before and quickly losing my breath after few hundred meters,

No longer feeling anything but tenderness at the sight of the beloved,

Thinking with nostalgia of the happy times when I looked forward to future projects.

A French song of the 80s, "Becoming old", sung in 1988 by Denise Grey when she was about 83 years old, comes to mind:

We cling to the past

Like ivy on a wall

and the frozen mirrors

Remind us of injuries

Of time passed too quickly

Laughing of our skin

The heart is crumbling

As the stones of a castle

refrain :

It is like a candle

That you forget to turn off

Which burn a lifetime

So that we can paint

On the walls of our eyes

Everything we have learned

Grief, tenderness

Day blue, gray days

This is also to get old

And when like a bird

We feel the departure time

Wings flush with the back

One off history

This is not what hurts

It does not even cry

It's not hard to leave

When you no longer want to stay

At age 20, or even 40 years, one year more or less, it does not matter. But in my age (soon 84), each week matters. Since a few months, I have some problems with my short term memory. To ensure that my clients do not realize it too much, I have to take notes after each phone call and after each meeting. I prefer to send emails rather than calling and I print out all my emails to keep track of.

And yet, despite my concerns, I feel young, very young, and I relive in my dreams every night episodes of my youth. I see myself as I was 20 years old, my first encounters with girls (and boys), the early days of my marriage, the birth of my first son .....

Whoever said "life is like a long quiet river" was very wrong to say, at least for me.

When I will be a little less rushed, I will take the thread of my story, abandoned for almost 3 months, for my pleasure and, who knows, perhaps for yours.