Today, when I came in from my walk, I came in to warm up, not cool down. Clouds had blown in on a puff of fall-like air. It looks like rain, but the guy on the radio says it’s not supposed to do that tonight.

I love this Global Cooling, at least in July. Speaking as the guy who pays the air conditioning bill around here.

I’m seriously tackling the Archives Room in the library now. I spent today organizing old magazines and shelving them in boxes.

This is a process that induces long thoughts. “Long thoughts” is the phrase that comes to my mind. I have the idea it’s a Norwegian idiom. That would be “lange tanker.” I have no specific memory of ever encountering those words in my Norwegian reading, but my brain insists it must be so.

“Long thoughts” (whether a genuine Norwegian phrase or the effluvient of my own imagination) are a combination of memory and melancholy. The kind of thoughts old people think when they look back over their lives. Sad memories are sad, but good memories are sad too, because they (and many of the people in them) are gone forever.

When I hold a magazine printed at the time of my birth, it looks like it was printed in another age. Because it was. It was printed in the Age of Analog, and today is the Digital Age. It was printed in the Age of American Faith, and today is the American Befuddled Age.

It’s also melancholy to look at pictures of people who were not young, but were still robust and healthy (about my present age, actually), a couple decades ago, who are dead and gone now, and whom I only ever knew as old people.

For all my professed faith, I fear I’ve always been worldly in my thinking. I evaluate things by the standards of this world (and pretty cynically, at that).

Growing older is a reality bath. You’re forced to understand that mortal life is a bank account you’re spending the principle on, and that if that’s the only account you’ve got, you’re looking at a crash at the end of the amortization.

I’ve always understood that old people were wiser than young people. But I’m beginning to appreciate that old people have practical knowledge the young don’t possess, as well.

And that “practical” is a word with a much larger meaning than I’d guessed.