Frailty I notice more now. The inevitability if you live long, how normal it is to go from what might have been tough and independent to weak and uncertain. I wonder about how I play piano and what I might do in advance to keep it working reliably long as possible. Saw some footage of Garth Hudson playing five years ago when he was 80. I could see what was working and was not working in his hands and it was more than a couple emotions at once to view. You can’t beat the frail thing but maybe you can inhibit which parts get weakest quickest. I had a great uncle Isaak, who was in his 90s when my dad and I visited him in an old folks home when I was little. My middle name is Neil, after Isaac’s wife, Nachamel. I was named in Hebrew and then it was anglicized. The Hebrew name is Rochmiel Nacham, the Rochmiel is after my father’s mother Rochel who died a couple months before I arrived. After three boys they were certain I would be a girl, sorry everyone. Our daughter’s middle name is Emmanuelle after my dad Manuel. People called him Mannie and I suggested it to my wife who said there was no way she would name a female “mannie” accentuating the “man” part. It never occured to me. I thought his name was cool and that everyone else thought so too. His best friend growing up also was a Mannie but I only ever came upon it once in the adult Toronto world, when I got the windshield replaced at Mannie’s Autoglass on Sorauren. When I told him my dad was a Mannie too and he said you’re probably a Jew. .Uncle Isaak’s teeth were in a cup on the desk next to his bed where we found him sleeping when we dropped in on afternoons. He came alive more when my father reminded him that the little boy’s middle name was Nacham. I can see now how mystical that might have been for an old man, to look at a kid and know they had the name of their lover, and who was never to be known again except for this little pisher who will never know her except the sound. My dad would bring him a sandwich and a flask of something alcoholic which he would sneak in. It was an exciting moment when Isaak realized Mannie was offering him a shot. Even though I was wee I knew we were breaking the law for those five seconds and it was awesome. Sixty-five years earlier he was the Reeve of West Kildonan which I think is something close to being a mayor. My mother is in her 90s now. I do not remember her being as small as she is now. Ongoingly she adjusts to the way frailty overcomes the way she previously lived. She was a painter but she can’t paint now. She was a driver, she can’t drive now. She was a mother and she wants to still be a mother but that’s the thing about time and frailty, everything you identify with gets challenged or repositioned and a lot won’t work the way you expected it always to. I guess it’s training to be unattached to this old life in the first place.