These days I seem to have a problem with dread. The nature is unclear. After all, there is always something to fear. Driving my car to a couple of places this afternoon being the current focus. And on a regular basis I try to analyze, or at least make concrete, the object of my fears. Does this help? A little, I think. That and lots of deep breathing.

It is as though I really can’t take anything for granted. With the realization dawning on me that I never could. All of life’s basics…that the body works, that I will make it downtown…none of this is to be assumed, not at age 70. The acute and immediate sense of uncertainty, even of menace, seems to dominate my waking moments.

Which interestingly enough, has a paradoxically good effect on my sleeping moments. I seem to get all the tsuris out of the way during daylight hours. This makes for restful nights. Terribly efficient, one must acknowledge.

The problem with worries is obvious. They crowd out the rest. Like Jane and our life together. Like the four animals who orbit us during the days. Like the greenhouse where my tomatoes are recovering. And where I do my recovering too.

Yes, I go there periodically, tilt my wheelchair back and enjoy a little reclining and a little sun. It’s warm, quiet, even vaguely amniotic. A little solar-heated space to, well, space. A general sense of security and well-being, well it’s not something I come by easily. And a place where things are growing. Even recovering. The tomatoes in particular, having been felled by the usual excessive bloom of soil bacteria, the so-called ‘wilt,’ I remembered what I already knew. Chicken manure. Gets everything back in balance. The soil. Me.

And by the way, worry and agitation do not make me productive. They make me active. Production comes from someplace else, and I actually think that a sense of well-being is a help. Stephen Sondheim says that he likes composing lying down. Dalton Trumbo wrote in a bathtub…if the movie about him is to be believed. What the hell. Relax.