Grandsons. Drop them off at the truck stop North Bend. Their mother is so thankfulfor the days. But then my first hour at Kathy's taunt weave of thoughts about to split and fray. Stand to leave then sit back down and another hour for an inch under the surface where my thoughts are my thoughts and not who wants: what's there to eat, can we watch a movie, can we go down to the creek, can we start a fire? Finally Kathy and I talk about men. Somehow it comes out of nowhere how badly men age: Truck driver, CEO, contractor. Once it was enough that they were muscled and healthy. Provide and then not sole providers and then no providing at all. They used to stand out in the world. Did things only each one could do and the point was not to share. It was the wheeler dealer one way or the other. And we women did all the other things. All-the-other-things. In a cooperative, with feeling and we are still doing it. These men got anxious and depressed. They are surpassed. Their muscles are slack, hands shake, and carburetors lie rusting in the junk yards. But Kathy and Jacki and I, we never could rely on our beauty our ability to wear bikinis unabashedly. We were impossibly supple, lithe with smooth skin but only saw the quarter inch of roll above our jeans. We saw that our eyebrows spilled forward toward our nose, that our cup size was never enough and we went into aging counting only on our own resilience. There is a myth that men age well but women decline. But it was always only appearances. Men, our generation, age badly.