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 BEAR: I visited my brother yesterday. HOOKER: He any better? BEAR: About the same. I always feel so guilty after seeing him. HOOKER: Why's that? BEAR: All he talks about is how boring it is there and what a relief from boredom it is to have me visit. He makes me feel like I should be visiting every day. The thing is, I can understand why he's bored. Activities amount to exercising, bingo, cards, and Bible study. He sometimes plays pinochle once a week. That's about it. HOOKER: Sounds boring to me, too. BEAR: Do you ever get bored? HOOKER: Rarely. You? BEAR: Sorry to say I do. Our Tuesday coffees often are the highlight of the week. The rest of the time, I'm climbing the walls. HOOKER: Now that surprises me. Doesn't your son live in Portland? BEAR:  He does. But I'm lucky if I hear from him once a month. HOOKER: Man, that's too bad. BEAR: I hear from my granddaughter more often, even when she's back east. HOOKER: I hear something like this and I don'...

 BEAR: When you lost Maggie, did you find yourself regretting that you hadn't told her certain things before she died? HOOKER: Oh yes. I think it's common. BEAR: After burying Liz, I couldn't remember the last time I'd told her I love her. I'm sure she knew I did but I was so upset about not telling her more often that my doctor treated me for depression. HOOKER: My dad was like that. He took me aside and told me not to make his mistake. So Maggie and I didn't have this problem, we told one another daily, often more than that. "Goodnight, I love you." I regreted something else. After retiring, she took up making jewelry. Good, I thought, she has a hobby to keep her busy. I didn't think much about it otherwise. BEAR: So what happened? HOOKER: I went through it after she died. Her jewelry was art! Moreover, she was selling it, she had business records. I should have paid more attention to all this when she was alive. BEAR: No marriage is perfect, is ...

 HOOKER: Bear, have you thought about what you're going to do when you decide you need help on a few things? BEAR: What I need help on right now is eating. I hate cooking. Meal delivery seems a little spendy. I eat a lot of meals you can microwave. Breakfast is best. Jimmy Dean sausage and gravy! It's really good. Or McDonald's drive through, Eggs and Sausage McMuffin. But by and large, my meals are not very healthy. Liz would be appalled. HOOKER: I have a plan for addressing this situation. BEAR: What's that? HOOKER: There must be fifty independent living retirement facilities in the Portland area. BEAR: My brother's in one. He's not terribly fond of living there. HOOKER: Hear me out. I toured one the other day and it ends up if you tour around noon, you get a free lunch. Here's the plan. We do coffee on Tuesdays, one week at your apartment, the next at mine. How about each Thursday we tour a living facility and get a free lunch? BEAR: A free lunch every we...

 (A song plays on Hooker's cell phone, by Ramblin Jack Elliott:) I went to the doctor / The doctor said, "Son, / you've got arthritis / and it ain't no fun." / And it's all kinds of trouble / gonna find you somehow. // Arthritis is a thing to miss / It will leave you walking / with a double twist. / And it's all kinds of trouble / gonna find you somehow. (The song ends.) HOOKER: He's talking about us, my friend.  BEAR: Not about me any more. I'm my old self after knee replacement surgery. You really should consider it. HOOKER: I know, I know. Maggie said the same thing. She was a great hiker and now she was on the trail again. BEAR: What are you afraid of? HOOKER: I'm not afraid of anything. I just don't like the idea of being turned into a bionic man. Doctors keep making us live longer, by the time we die we won't have any natural parts left. BEAR: You exaggerate. HOOKER: I hope so. The thing is, Bear, the health industry is extending ...

 BEAR:  Maggie donated her body to science, didn't she? HOOKER: Right. And I plan to do the same. You have a problem with that? BEAR: No, no. If you were being cremated, I have a horror story for you. Might affect where you wanted your ashes scattered. HOOKER: What's the story? BEAR: This happened to a friend of my son. When his mom died, they scattered her ashes in her favorite fishing hole down on the Applegate. Ten years later his sister died in a car crash, and she wanted her ashes spread with her mom. So he drives to the Applegate to do that and the fishing hole is gone. They built a dam!  My son says his friend rented a boat and tried to figure out where the fishing hole might be but finally gave up and just scattered the ashes in the new lake. HOOKER: Ouch. BEAR: Moral: spread your ashes someplace that is going to be around for a while. Or get buried in a cemetery. You can't get more permanent than that. HOOKER: Which is your choice, I presume. BEAR: Of course. Rig...

 HOOKER: I really spaced out this morning. Sitting on the couch for over an hour, the dog asleep on my lap, cool jazz playing on the Echo, my thoughts all over the place. BEAR:' Thinking about Maggie? HOOKER: Not so much. This wasn't about grieving her loss. I'm not sure what it was. An escape from boredom maybe. BEAR: I have yet to find an escape from boredom. Our Tuesday ritual, of course. An occasional visit from granddaughter number one. An even more occasional phone call from my son. A home basketball game to watch granddaughter number two. Otherwise I'm climbing the walls. HOOKER: What 's your mind doing then? (Bear laughs.) BEAR: I think your mind is more active than mine. I don't remember thinking about anything. So what were you thinking about? HOOKER: Mostly about my past and about bad moments when I screwed up something. BEAR: I don't remember too much of that. HOOKER: Well, I hardly felt like sharing it at the time.  BEAR: Give me an example. HOO...

 HOOKER: I wrote my obituary over the weekend. BEAR: My God! HOOKER: There's nothing wrong with me. I was watching a discussion on TV and a shrink recommended it as a valuable exercise for anyone. Boy was he right. BEAR: Tell me more. HOOKER: Writing your obit is more or less telling your own life story, and my memory brought up experiences I hadn't thought about in years. Decades. I ended up with far too many pages to publish as an obituary but more importantly with insights I never had before. BEAR: Can you share them? HOOKER: How unfocused and lost I was until the Army changed me. But not in the way the commercials suggest. I was the front desk clerk to a small company of Russian linguists. BEAR: You speak Russian? HOOKER: No. The job didn't require it. But I had a Top Secret Codeword security clearance because I typed reports sent to the Pentagon.  BEAR: This was after your undergraduate degree?  HOOKER: I dropped out in the middle of my sophomore year. I had no idea ...