It’s late and I should go to bed. Buuut, apparently in spite of my griping about the West Coast stay — that’s it, girl; make a big stink out of being in paradise for a week — there was one thing I really liked about it and that was the time zone, because there’s no way it feels like it’s after midnight. Which pretty much guarantees that there’ll be no way it’ll feel like 9:30 tomorrow morning. Set an alarm? Naah. I’ll just enjoy it while it lasts.

But anyway, I should be more specific. Experiencing jet lag wasn’t the only fun(?). Greg and I also connected up with old friends from St. Barnabas, which is always a good time. And we’ve almost gotten over how tacky it is for all the kids to have grown up into, y’know, people and thereby make us feel like old fogies. (That’s all right, you little nerds — it’ll happen to you, too. Unfortunately, by the time it does, I’ll likely be too senile to get any satisfaction from it.)

Since the trip down Memory Lane highlights my advanced years, I can at least notice the benefits as well. Remembering that there was a time when all the people could easily fit in Fr. Mike’s living room (if Sam the parakeet was removed) makes it all the more exciting that they’re now purchasing additional space in the commercial complex and could probably bring in any number of parakeets with impunity.

And remembering that for years (or maybe it just seemed like years) my sister Lynn and I were the choir and all our chanting was Tone Zzzz (”blah blah blah UP, blah blah blah DOWN”) makes it great to listen to the full choir (FOUR parts … ooooooo) that does real Byzantine stuff. (I’m now qualified to say what real Byzantine stuff is, of course, because I’ve been to the Sacred Music Institute. So now I know why you’re supposed to start chanting in Tone 1 by singing a measure from “Der Kommissar” with nonsense Greek words put in.) (I thought that was just to mortify your sense of rational thought. O, how silly I was.)

So what I’m getting at (though I’m spending far too much time in parentheses, which is a problem of mine that corresponds with my reliance on stupid digressions — like this one) is that the advantage to having logged in more years is that you occasionally see progress in all the right ways. That seems worth the trip, both in miles and in mileage.