Today's found object: in the bottom of a shopping cart, a list scrawled on the back of a Central Penn AAA envelope. The handwriting is large and angular, the way cursive writing gets in older people. The first three items are in blue ink, the last four in pencil. The list maker wants to buy:

I spent a good deal of time this weekend sighing and pondering The Meaning of Life (which I can't at the moment discern) and The Futility of Existence (which seems to pervade my consciousness). I'm not depressed, clinically speaking, and I'm far from suicidal, but I am in a funk. It's rather unattractive, actually, even from the inside.

Time magazine has a cover story on the SATs. They give eight sample questions, four from verbal, four from math, all but one of which (a math example) were answered correctly by fewer than half of the test takers (in the case of three of the verbal, fewer than one quarter). I breezed through the verbal questions and got every one right, conscious that the stumbling block was vocabulary and that I might not have had command of those words and their nuances at 18. I didn't even know where to start with the math problems. (For the record, my combined score in 1964 was <1400. See, I can use math speak!!)

Lynn and I attended the 8:30 service at our church rather than the 11:00 because she had a hockey game beginning at noon. It was like being in a foreign country.