A Day In The Life Of A Blogger

Compulsive readers of my blog will note that none appeared yesterday and today I am writing several hours later than usual.  It is the season here in Sarasota, by which I mean that visitors seeking warmth descend on us.  Not so grim as I make it sound.  Granddaughter, great grandson, daughter, all good, but only the last actually stayed with us. How odd it is that I had so looked forward to house guests when we moved down here, but that enthusiasm has sort of gone.  I remember living in Cambridge and Rome and Brooklne and Hull, in houses and apartments mostly big, but even when small, and always crazy fun when guests were on hand.  What has changed?  Well, first of all, everyone is much older.  The genial host of forty five waving a bottle of wine in his guests' faces has surrendered to a wizened up old gentleman of eighty seven who stumbles from room to room, anxious over the appointments of the guest room, and myriad other hospitality concerns.  However, without question, the greatest test of hospitality nowadays is the problem of diet: gluten free food, lactose intolerance, vegetarianism, vegan diets, aversion to alcohol-- the list is endless.  Oh, carefree graduate school days when one ate what was set before him or her, and loved it, and drank up a storm and laughed oneself silly, and maybe smoked oneself into a higher consciousness, when sexual games and satisfactions so outweighed dietary requirements.  Aging hosts such as ourselves are exhausted by the time the guests arrive, the effort at being cheerful so burdens someone in his eighties, and I am ready for bed as I show them to their guest apartment and hear them exclaim that they will be over in half an hour.  I do not want to talk to anyone.  I do not want to catch up, I discover.  I just want to go to bed.