I appreciate your concern about my health and happiness, for I remember similar feelings toward my parents, but I will do my best to assure you that there is no reason for worry, let alone fear. Let me start with my health. I am doing pretty well, and especially for my age. Remember, I will turn sixty-eight in two months only. Ever since my move to Croatia eleven years ago, I have not been ill in any serious way. My sinuses are a bother, and for about a year already, but that is hardly worth talking about. Perhaps the greatest nuisance are my teeth. Having gone through a major overhaul a couple of years ago, now I face several problems that need fixing as soon as possible. Within a month or two, I will lose two teeth. Yuck.

Concerning health, I should add that I am doing my best to eat as little as possible, as well as to drink as little alcohol as possible. I have dropped cigars last year, which I am pretty happy about. As you can imagine, it was not easy, but the silly habit is squarely behind me. The sort of food I eat now is also making me quite happy, and I am amazed how little I actually need to keep in good shape without any pangs of hunger. Cutting down on wine and beer will take a while, I figure, but I feel sanguine about the eventual success. You would not believe it, but I am switching to green tea. Well, I would not believe it myself only a few weeks ago.

As far as happiness is concerned, I cannot complain, either. My life with my beloved is exemplary in many ways. We are very much in love. In many ways, she is indeed my first woman. What matters to me a great deal is that I cannot even imagine cheating on her. And not only literally, but in every sense of that word. Although she has been quite busy lately, we spend a lot of time together. Quality time, too. That is, we talk and hug and kiss, and so on. As I like to say to younger men I bump into, I am glad that I can say that life with a woman makes sense to me at long last. All our foibles notwithstanding, we are a great couple, indeed. Besides, there is no reason to fear any sudden change for the worse.

If there is anything I am unhappy about, it is the human race. The whole lot. Not only that it is pitiful right now, as well as up to this point, but I cannot see how it could evolve to anything worth bragging about. I can imagine it cycling forever from one disaster to another. To put things in wider perspective, interglacial periods will lead this miserable race to excesses of all sorts, while glaciations will decimate its population and drive it back into caves. That is how I see things. Feeling ashamed to be of the same race, all I can envisage at this stage of human development is bleak or worse. The best I can do about all this is laugh. And laugh I do often enough.

All in all, my health and happiness are beyond any concern for the time being, as I said at the outset. Still, I know that I cannot alley your anxiety in so many words, no matter how clever. Imagine, I occasionally dream about worrying about my parents so many years after their death. And I wonder whether it could be otherwise. Children and parents are bound together in so many ways that it is hard to imagine that anything can be achieved by reason alone. After all, we are animals. Instincts rule supreme. Be that as it may, I hope that these five paragraphs will make some sense to you. I certainly hope so, but we can keep talking like this as long as I am about and around.