She thought about Dinah-2005. She tried to summon up an image of her. She glimpsed someone who had strands of still-dark hair around her face. A body ten pounds lighter than Dinah in 2015, housing a mind more unhappy with her own shape than now.

Dinah-2005 assumed that she had started down the slope toward old age and that the slide was going to be constant. She misplaced a noun then, here and there, and noticed that she sometimes forgot what she was about to say, and she worried she was treading the path toward dementia, like her father, even though he gave no sign of losing it till he was 77. Dinah-2005 didn’t know then that the slide isn’t constant. Her face wrinkles hadn’t deepened as much as she feared they would in the decade since. Her word/idea loss didn’t worsen. She now understood that aging included a number of plateaus.

Back in 2005 Dinah certainly knew her retriever was sick, old and not going to last much longer. But she didn’t know that the dog’s death would be so much more civilized than her father’s. She didn’t anticipate how sensible would be that vet-administered shot, after a tranquilizer, in a comfortable room, her arms around her dying pet. She had no idea how dreadful it would be to watch her father’s body starve to death in a hospital bed, where she provided similar brow kisses and passionate words of assurance but felt disconnected from the process and cold amid the hospital protocols. She wouldn’t have guessed before going through those deaths that her dog grief would be sharper than the bereavement she suffered when she lost a dear parent who had actually departed six years earlier, and she knows now that the real estate changes were as much triggered by the emptiness in the post-dog house as by the desire to provide better housing for and better visits with her daughter’s family.

Dinah-2015 then tried to inhabit Dinah-2005. She sat back in her desk chair, closed her eyes, and dreamed backwards. That 55 year-old phantom was harder to catch than memories of elementary school. But after a few minutes she managed to engender a specter of her old self.

The specter was ill. Wasn’t 2005 the winter of the nonstop cold? Wasn’t that when she thought she’d never feel vibrant and energetic again? She happened to chat with a doctor client and honestly answered his “how are you?” in January. He asked her a few questions and prescribed penicillin. She balked, then as now leery of white market drugs. “Why should I take an antibiotic for a cold?” He told her it wasn’t for the cold. He explained that her immune system was so busy fighting the cold that various opportunistic bacteria were having a heyday in her. He said the penicillin would give her body a break and let it dump the cold virus. That made so much sense she filled the prescription.

But she wasn’t sure that was 2005. She remembered sitting at her office desk for that call, and the furniture arrangement was more like 1999, or 1995. She wasn’t feeling any thrill of accomplishment about her ability to recall ten years ago. She thought that she probably felt old then, and somewhat hopeless.

Anyway, next she made a try at imagining ten years hence. Her son will or will not become a father in the next decade. Her grandkids will be 19, 17, 15. But that’s about them: who and how will Dinah be? She’ll probably stop working and that will mean changes in how she spends her days. Her teeth will probably continue to give her problems; she forecasts consequential changes in diet.

Her train of thought was then interrupted – shunted to a long siding – by a rap at her door.

She started to get up when she heard the open/close sounds and knew it had to be Annie. Dinah’s kids no longer lived nearby, but her best friend did. Annie had a key and a custom of dropping by almost every evening. She had given up her day job a decade ago when her father passed and she inherited enough to live on; she had lots of time on her hands and enough loneliness that her visits were near-daily.

She also had enough loneliness to re-up with her old married lover. They went back 35 years, to the late 1970s when they were young and pretty. Even then Jeff had been married, solidly if not happily. Annie was single then (still is, but back then everyone including she thought it was just a temporary condition before husband, home and babies). She was good-looking and classically vivacious; she enjoyed a few drinks after work and lapped up the attention of the ambient men.

Their early affair lasted about a year. Jeff then went back to commuting home after work, and Annie turned to other guys and a lingering relationship with a depressive alcoholic Catholic from Chicago. Days grew into weeks that amounted to months that became years and decades.