Until three years ago it would have been easy to ignore, but it's impossible now. The path is straight as ever, but now it is strewn with the rocks and gravel that accumulate over a lifetime. Time, unfortunately, doesn't make it easy to stay on course.

I have no complaints about my path and the places it has taken me enough complaints to fill a circus tent about other things, maybe, but the path I've chosen has always been the right one, and I wouldn't have had it any other way. In my mind it's a little bit of both, and no matter how you choose to view it in the end, it does not change the fact that it involves a great deal of my life and the path I've chosen to follow. The romantics would call this a love story, the cynics would call it a tragedy. There are no monuments dedicated to me and my name will soon be forgotten, but I've loved another with all my heart and soul, and to me, this has always been enough. I am a common man with common thoughts, and I've led a common life. A good buy, a lucky buy, and I've learned that not everyone can say this about his life. I suppose it has most resembled a blue-chip stock: fairly stable, more ups than downs, and gradually trending upward over time. It has not been the rip-roaring spectacular I fancied it would be, but neither have I burrowed around with the gophers. I wonder if this is how it is for everyone my age.

Eighty years, I think sometimes, and despite my own acceptance of my age, it still amazes me that I haven't been warm since George Bush was president. It clicks and groans and spews hot air like a fairytale dragon, and still my body shivers with a cold that will never go away, a cold that has been eighty years in the making. The thermostat in my room is set as high as it will go, and a smaller space heater sits directly behind me. I'm a sight this morning: two shirts, heavy pants, a scarf wrapped twice around my neck and tucked into a thick sweater knitted by my daughter thirty birthdays ago. The sun has come up and I am sitting by a window that is foggy with the breath of a life gone by. Who am I? And how, I wonder, will this story end?

The notebook sparks