Pounding The Keyboard

       There are two things that are certain in this world: growing old and dying. Most men in my family (grandfathers, my father, uncles, cousins, etc.) don’t get to be septuagenarian; they die in their fifties and sixties, some even younger. And I don’t mind. In this world that gets harsher every year, you’d be lucky to live in your fifties—until my younger sister started sharing to us anecdotes about her precocious five year old son who is in kindergarten. The little guy took nursery school with ease and ended up with the highest honor. They would sit down to dinner and his son would regale them with information about multiverse, galaxies, solar systems, the size of the moon and the planets, how tall some famous mountains are and how numbers don’t stop in the billions. No, they don’t teach these things in kindergarten; her son would search and read them on Internet. And my sister also told us how she had noticed her son getting bored with his online classes...

       So the past few days, I’m seeing on my Facebook News Feed pictures of reunions of komiks writers (which I used to be) and editors. Reunions, plural,   meaning these are reunions/parties held in different years (always around Christmas and New Year). And I realized I wasn’t there, that I haven’t attended even a single reunion. I was invited to many of these gatherings, I acquiesced to some of them, but still I didn’t attend, preferring to stay at home, drinking alone, staring at the wall or watching some paint dry while listening to Simon & Garfunkel’s I Am A Rock .      But now, looking at these photos, and how the people there seemed jovial and in high spirits, I probably should have attended. The food seemed delicious and beer, of course, is free. Tsk! It was a terrible mistake missing these gatherings. I probably would have had a grand time being in these partie—Wait, somebody sent me a private message, it’s from a frie...