In all the excitement of an election week very few noticed that Mathilda had quietly slipped from this life to the next. No, you didn't know her, but her life represents the rush of history to me.

Mathilda was my mother's first cousin and she was the last of her generation to walk this earth, since she was 98 when she died. I write about her because in that almost-a-century of living she was part of more changes than most people experience.

Born in 1910 she lived through 17 presidencies and died as a history-making 18th was elected. She was born into a home lit by gas and died at a time when outer space exploration is taken for granted. She came into a world where women could not vote and died as a black man readies himself to move into a White House built by slaves.

Eight or nine years ago, at a noontime Bible study, when a member of the group has just lost his job, the group began talking about all the words we use to express that fact. Since then I have stored up more terminology. Here's some of it.

In this failing economy, when the "reduction notifications" are given out, is it because the worker's position has been "eliminated" or is the firm "downsizing" as it "outsources" certain departments?

Workers used to be simply "fired," "laid off," or "dismissed." Not any longer. Now they "part company" as the firm "regroups" or "merges."

I am a faithful reader of the obituary page in the newspaper, not to check if my name is there (as one humorist always said), but to see in what way we are impoverished by the latest departures from this earth.

Sometimes it is a long-forgotten film star, a lesser member of the waning royalty of Europe, a minor scientist whose early work led to later glory for someone else...

October 28 marked the loss of a good friend. I never met him in person, never spoke to him on the phone, but I so loved his work that each addition to his list of books was a fresh delight. Tony Hillerman will never know the pleasure that he as an author gave to me as a reader.

The parable of the Good Samaritan conjures up images of the semi-desert road that to this day stretches from Jerusalem to Jericho. It was on that lonely stretch that charity became real at the hands of an enemy stranger. But I have my own Jericho road.

I live almost at the city limits of Kingston, a city with a history that stretches back to a Dutch settlement in the 17th century. My street is part of the Revolutionary War history since it was the escape route of the settlers when the British army burned Kingston. But more of that another time...

Since public transportation is almost non-existent, I have ample time to reflect on my predecessors as I set out on a road without sidewalks to do the errands that we all have in our days.

I will always maintain that the subway, the metro, the underground—whatever we might call the subterranean travel system in different cities of the world—is one of the greatest modern inventions. New York's alone transports millions of us each day and provides human interest stories at the same time. They're the freebies of each journey.

The morning crowd consists of those heading off to work. One day last week I was jammed against a pole with a much taller man, so all I could perceive of him was a plaid shirt above his jeans. However, when we reached his stop, he bent down, picked up a covered basket of tar, revealed that his other arm held a long-handled brush, and off he went to do someone's roof.

As I waited in our tiny terminal early one Sunday for my bus from Kingston to New York City, I could not help overhearing the request of a fellow traveler who was purchasing a bus ticket from Kingston to Los Angeles!

Yes, if she left on that 6:30am bus on Sunday, she would arrive in LA on Wednesday at 2pm. I was flabbergasted. She purchased her tickets and turned to address anyone within earshot: "I've had a grand visit here with family, but it's time to go home now. I do this every two years or so."

I wanted to applaud what must be involved in that cross-country trip on our highways, courtesy of interstate buses. She added: "It's interesting, you know, seeing the country as we go along."

There are very few blank slates any more. Every available site is simply background for an ad. We have become so used to it that we accept that bus shelters offer some unusual thoughts—and images—, that clothing has its labels on the outside and that TV ads are less and less tasteful.

I will admit I was a bit startled the first time I walked into Port Authority bus terminal and found I was walking on advertising. Now I look forward to the changing messages.

I was recently in Penn Station for the first time since last spring. As I was leaving I was halted in my tracks. What was that? Quite simply, NesTEA has claimed the risers of the steps leading to 7th Avenue. Glimpsed from a distance it looked as if the travelers were climbing a billboard. Clever!

As a church we have learned that subway ads are effective. After all, we have to do something while we cling to our poles. The bus shelter ads appeal to the passing pedestrian as well as to the patient traveler inside. Handbags, totes, umbrellas (preferably when open), all sport logos or messages.

I suppose it was inevitable, given our national obsession both with exercising and multitasking. The days of great-grandma and grandpa, when the ordinary chores of farm work and household care offered enough muscle-bending to prevent obesity are forever gone. And so we have had to invent exercise equivalents.

The New York Times of September 18 illustrates the latest gift to exercise lovers. For those bored with the gym or unable to rise early enough to take advantage of its offerings, the treadmill has come to you!

An endocrinologist from the Mayo Clinic has constructed the first treadmill desk by uniting a hospital bedtray with a treadmill. Add your laptop, and the workwalker is all set to burn 100 to 130 calories an hour as he walks a leisurely 1.4 miles an hour at his work station.

It has already been crowded off the front pages of our papers by the newer catastrophes on Wall Street but it still defies the imagination. To see the piles of matchstick-like wood that once were homes, the concrete slabs that mark where houses stood, the total lack of foliage that makes what once was street seem like a moonscape—to see this makes it hard to say that this is Galveston.

I have a friend who lives there. Since I cannot contact him now, and since he is a prudent and intelligent person, I can only believe that he and his family are safe somewhere else in Texas.

I keep coming back to those piles of destruction that are all that is left of people's hopes and dreams, and I wonder how many lives have disappeared as their houses blew away. One official has said there will be no accurate count of the dead and missing until someone goes street by street and tries to locate each person who once lived there.

I was home on a rare afternoon during the US Open and I was channel surfing to find my favorite tennis players. As I passed through a soap opera, I was just in time to hear one character say slowly to another: "You don't have tomorrow."

I stopped. I was halted in my tracks by the sheer banality and truth of that remark. And I thought what it might be like if, for one day or perhaps even a part of a day, we lived in the present moment, as fully as possible.

"We look before and after, and sigh for what is not," lamented a poet. He is absolutely right. We are always looking ahead—is that why we carry planners wherever we go? And if we are not looking to tomorrow and tomorrow, we are looking back at what did not succeed and wondering why, or admiring our successes to offer self-congratulations. But how about the now?