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I'll turn sixty in a few weeks.. for the very first time in my life I actually feel old. Oh, not so different physically, but that number definitely carries a lot of power. Fifty-something is till fifty-something, but sixty - well, that's getting there, isn't it?

Well, maybe not. My family tends toward longevity, with my mother and my father's mother living well into their nineties.. I guess I don't have to get too maudlin yet. But then again, that's the women: the men have mostly gone in their sixties and seventies, so I may not have all that much time left.

I'm not a religious person. I am quite sure that death is simply the end, a final lights out. That used to bother me - not obsessively, not that I'd think about it often, but like Doris Small, I wasn't planning on going "gentle into that good night". I'm still not planning on any easy acceptance of my demise, but it is true that something is changing. It's not that I'm ready to die, or like the idea, but now, for the first time ever in my life, it's OK.

It's OK. There, I said it out loud. It's OK that I will die. Even if it's soon. It's OK.

Oh, I have some regrets. I wish I'd been smarter about money. I'll probably have to work until I die or get so sick that I physically can't. On the other hand, I wasn't totally stupid on that subject either; I won't have to work all that hard to keep our heads above water.

I'd like to take Linda on a cross country trip. That's not something I care about or even want to do: I spent too much time traveling for business to think of that as fun. But it is something she'd like to do, and I think we should. I've thought about the cost and think that all told it might run us twenty thousand or so.. we really shouldn't pull that much out of our retirement funds, but it would mean a lot to her. We've kicked the tires of that bus a few times and keep deciding that it's too much, but maybe it isn't. So we'll have that much less for our "golden years" - isn't doing something you really want to do part of those years? I think maybe it is. We'll kick those tires again.

Other regrets? Not many, frankly. There easily could have been many more, but we've usually indulged ourselves when we wanted to. Not that we had everything we ever wanted, but we certainly had more than we needed. It would be hard for me to sum up the totality of our lives and not agree that it was all pretty good overall. I wish we had moved here a year earlier and beaten the real estate downturn, but again it could have been worse.

Coincidentally, after I started writing this, I came across My 2008 Bucket List which asks:

If you had 6 months to live and all of the money in the world what would you do before you died?

I guess I'd take Linda on that trip..