The Disco Beat Of Life

I love nothing more, used to love, than disco where I would quickly be so lost in the beat that I was definitely in that place they used to call "gay abandon," which nowadays would make the hearer laugh at the double entendre, which remains nonetheless true in both sensea, no doubt that the rhythm and rapid movement lets me leave the self which is prey to all the anxieties societal and others that being me engender.  The same out of body sense comes over me when I travel, nowhere more so than on the deliriously free moment when one is walking down the gateway to the waiting plane and one is no longer with the world of the airport and what came before that nor yet at the destination site.  Another mind out of body experience is moving one's household which allows one to sit in increasingly empty rooms, more and more devoid of the personality that decorated them, and go to new rooms empty of any character imposed as yet whatsoever.  Well, I have participated in the summer long undertaking of emptying and moving a household, I have traveled to a new location and set it up.  Weeks later I have gone with my husband to relax, first in London and then in Germany's spas, and now I am starting to pack again to go to the furthermost reaches of eastern Nova Scotia for a week of activities surrounding my granddaughter's wedding.  I will come back via Manhattan for a couple of days, then back down to Sarasota, where I will as they say pull my nerves together and shortly thereafter pack up again for a ten day trip with three dear friends to Athens.  I have wanted to see Greece one more time in my life, and have planned this trip off and on for a couple of years and now it has fallen into place.  Apart from the egotistical thrill that comes to an eighty four year old when he realizes that he can pretty much keep up the pace walking--in London we took our usual walk from the Paddington area down down through Kensington Park to Marble Arch--it is exhilarating to know that I keep my marbles--there are lots of ticket details, reservation details, money transactions, passport matters to keep in mind.  There won't be a grand let-down when I return from Greece toward the end of October, because late November we have tickets for a trip to friends in upper Vermon, followed by a visit to my daughter's house in rural New Hampshire for one of her celebrated family Thanksgiving dinners which we have truly missed from this distance.  Then comes December and we settle down, the theater, symphony, opera, chamber music seasons begin, and we are back to the gym three mornings a week.  So, party on, you old fool, fun, fun, fun.