I complain sometimes in these pages about things that are stupid, small, incidental and banal. There is no difference, I guess, in the long run, between those small silly worries and the bigger ones, the life-issues ones--in the end, the sum total of all our worries, concerns and fears all equal out as valid. But lately I do feel as though some of the bigger issues have been dogging my friends and myself.

I am getting older. To my dismay there seems to be absolutely no way to stop it.

To my even greater dismay, my parents are geeting older, and horribly, terribly, there is no way to stop this either. As the only child of a very close-knit little family, who cried going away to sleepover parties because I hated being parted from my parents, this is a horrible reality.

Even worse is really thinking about the practicalities of it all. I'm still so dependent on them; I have no family of my own--no husband, no children, and no sight of them cropping up anytime soon--to support me. What will I do when they get old enough to need care?

It's not so far away.

Life trundles along dispassionately and can snap us up or strike us down at any minute. My current stability feels so dubious, so tenuous, so delicate, a water-beetle perched on the surface of a pond with only surface tension keeping it skating along the surface of the water. At any minute I could fall through.