12:08 p.m. The guy in the picture didn't know his photo was being taken, and I didn't want to bother him. He's waiting for a hair cut in an outside waiting room on a busy street, and doing what any self-respecting unisex LA guy would do -- he's reading Movieline. It's a sunny day. He's got hair. Could life get any better than this?

If you want a similar experience, go and read some of the pages of the journal plaintive wail. It's as if the guy in the picture looked up from the mag for a sec and told you something he personally knew about Keanu or Tori or Calista or whomever that you'd never know ordinarily. Something self-deprecating, multi-referential, and knee-slapping funny.

But don't tell him I sent you, because I know how these members of the Zitgeist feel about people old enough to be and older than their parents. Old age, they fear, is a disease and it might be contagious. In Movielineland, it's not only shameful, it's fatal.

Best not to think about it as you sit there in God's own waiting room, waiting for the beauty part.

One evening not too long ago, Igor and I went to the water and as is the Jewish custom at that time of year, tossed in some bread, for sins. Unbelievably to me, out of nowhere the birds came! In no time at all, many many birds. The sea gulls, who have a graceful way of spiraling down, keeping their wings out like elbows, and then walking too. Plus, brown birds with slightly hooked beaks who look like poor cousins of the bigger white sea gulls. Terns? With webbed feet. A veritable feeling frenzy. Must be how the Blair Witch directors are feeling these days.

I had to call out, "Hey!" to Igor so he would give me some bread. He was ahead of me, tossing, terning ... I am polite and I wait my turn, but suddenly, horribly, my turn didn't look like it was coming because Igor was just gouging into the bag and flinging the Wonder every which way, and there I'd be, covered in sin, for the rest of the year.

Then, the sand was deep and hard to walk on -- harder than I remember, which could mean that this beach is just softer and you sink more, or indeed, I am older and my muscles are weaker than when I was young and tan and short and lovely, in New Jersey, at the shore. We couldn't decide whether to go one way to the bookstore, another to the restaurants on Washington, or straight back home. So I just stood there, in the tire ruts, enjoying the slight breeze against my headache, watching a guy in rollerblades holding onto a big red and white sail, maneuvering the curves on the rolling path. Capturing what there was of the slight breeze, using his spine as the main mast.

And so that's how we ended up seeing the sun set into the water, not as slowly as you would think. You can make out the entire curve of the earth; you wonder how the water doesn't fall off. Once you grow up, you're supposed to know, not wonder.

Then, we did walk to the bookstore and I got a runes book, a Movieline with Melanie or Meg on the cover, and a Kinky Friedman mystery. All of them are cute, all of them uplifting; plus, the runes book has stickers in it for the do-it-yourselfer. All you need do is find the twenty-five perfect stones. How hard can that be?

I used to think you had to be rich as you age. But now I see it doesn't matter. I've watched the cover girls turn 40 and then 30 and then become plastic, laminated into an indiscriminate age like a fraying wallet photo.

And now I've outlapped them as I round my way into my 50s. There's a slight breeze. I have laugh lines. That's the beauty part.