Very late last night, the rain ceased for a while, and there was a brief clearing, revealing the waning moon and patches of starry sky. There were yet fogs drifting through the forest. Only by their slow movement was it possible to distinguish them from the bare oaks, whose dense masses of twigs, when lit by moonlight, resemble small, earthbound clouds. But the clouds closed once more, and the day was once again gray, and afternoon dampened by drizzles. Birds clustered on telephone wires and the dark branches of pine trees, and did not sing.
A few hours remain before I shall have, to my surprise, survived another calendar year. The newspaper today brought the annual list of celebrities I have now outlasted. The list included a number of obscure one-hit-wonders, and it left out Warren Zevon. How capricious is fame! No, wait! He died last year! The years must be getting shorter. Yeah, that's it. Shorter years. Not getting older, at all. Just shorter years.
