I've just realized that another stage in my life has been realized, the one where I keep finding myself saying, "I've always wanted to ......, so here goes." I've always wanted to do this, and always wanted to do that, but because of the constraints of time or money or whatever they've never been done. Until now.

So, I've always wanted to transit the Panama Canal, and I've always wanted to explore some Mayan ruins, and now's the time. We leave on Sunday, flying to Los Angeles, where we'll board the Holland American cruise ship Ryndam and head south along the west coast of Mexico, Guatemala and Costa Rica, stopping every now and then to explore.

We'll then go through the Panama Canal into the Caribbean Sea down to Cartagena, Columbia, where we'll head north along the east coast of Central America with stops in Belize City and Costa Maya (site of Mayan ruins) before making a bee-line to Tampa and our flight home.

We're excited about this trip. For one thing it's in a new venue, a cruise ship rather than a motorhome, and for another it takes us to entirely new worlds, and for a third it lets us do some things we've always wanted to do!

So off we go, and I'll tell some of the stories when we return in mid-November.

I sat on the back porch as an afternoon storm passed through. Off in the distance lightning and thunder announced its impending arrival. Slowly it all drew closer. The few patches of blue sky gave way to darker and darker clouds, and then the rain began.

Slowly and silently at first, hardly more than a drizzle, then harder and louder as workmen in a new house down the street dashed for their trucks. Pine needles began to fall among the raindrops. Water rolled off the roof, into our one little gutter and then to the downspout where what had begun as a trickle became a torrent.

The air began to get cooler but it was refreshing after the heat of the day. Rain, heavier and heavier, came straight down and loudly bounced off anything solid and level. In the middle of the storm an unintimidated chickadee landed on one of the feeders for a late afternoon snack.

Then, as slowly as it had started, the sky began to lighten and a patch or two of white began to appear. The rainfall grew softer and more gentle, and the now impotent thunder and lightning moved off to the east.

The storm was gone.

No matter how young I may feel, I'm frequently reminded that the years are piling up, so that what might seem to be a commonplace and obvious truth in my own experience is completely foreign to others. Just the simple fact that Ann and I read the newspaper every day seems to date us, but there are more unusual examples.

Earlier this summer I was mowing the grass in the backyard, and since it's such a postage stamp yard it was being cut by a reel-type mower that I pushed; no sense getting a loud, smelly and expensive power mower for that job. About half-way through the project I glanced out to the street and discovered I had an audience: four of the young-ish Hispanic guys who do the lawn maintenance for our neighborhood were watching, talking among themselves and pointing at me and my mower.

They had never seen such a thing. My knowledge of Spanish matched their knowledge of lawn mowers, so we couldn't communicate too well, but it was obvious that this was something new to them. I was astounded. I just thought everyone knew about reel (and "real") lawnmowers, but I chalked it up to another cultural difference between Anglos and Hispanics.

Nope, not a "cultural difference". A couple of days later I was reciting this experience with a neighbor, a college educated guy around 40 who, surprise, had never seen, let alone pushed, a reel mower. I felt like an anacronism.

That same feeling popped up last weekend. I was rehearsing for a wedding, and asked the couple to sign the necessary papers with my pen, not a felt tip nor a ball point, but my trusty Waterman. I might as well have handed them a quill pen; they had never seen such an instrument and had to be shown how the point must be aimed for the paper just so, and would have been even more astounded had they seen me drawing ink from my bottle of Scripto.

Examples abound: the funny looks I get when I give the milk carton a quick shake to get the cream off the top, that row of books called an "encyclopedia", a wrist watch that has to be wound every morning. I guess the reason I feel like an anacronism is that I are one.