The Sightseeing Seniors of Cedarwood

A half moon low in the south: why so low? I don't think I've ever understood quite why the moon wanders so far from the ecliptic. Or does it? Maybe I'm just not minding the swings of the ecliptic. But sometimes the moon is high, way high, and sometimes low. As tonight. Mid-August, not particularly close to a solstice; it seems like the moon should be riding a middle way, not tangled in the trees of the flats south of Burnside. I'll have to look it up. But not now.

Now: that rounded chip caught in the trees, ivory-yellow. Diana. Σελήνη. Me he quedado mirando a la luna, a través de las finas acacias. And yet.

Feeling age pull at me, feeling the waste of my strength. I'm exercising a little again, going for little walks. Still feeling fragile, easily irritated, easily tired. What troubles me most, of course, is not having a lingering illness: it's discovering that the reason I haven't had a lingering illness before now is not that I'm a special person, who just doesn't put up with that sort of thing: it's that up till now I've had a nice run of dumb luck. in point of fact I'm just a regular person like other regular people. 

In Searoad an Important Man from Salem comes to a little Oregon beach town and takes a room at a hotel that has been mostly booked up by -- according to the side of their bus -- "The Sightseeing Seniors of Cedarwood: A Christian Community." He views them benevolently, but as the weekend progresses and people in town repeatedly assume he's one of them ("Your party is on the patio, sir") he gets less and less happy about them. Le Guin didn't go in for humor much, but it's deftly done.

Well. Let's call it a night, Dale. Here's hoping for another run of luck, eh?