She was a 27-year-old woman, with a nine-month-old son. But that didn’t stop him. He shoved her into a suitcase, anyway, and then zipped it up. And she wasn’t even dead. She was still alive . . . and conscious.

She’s alive and conscious today. All of them are: the woman, her baby, and the guy who stuffed her into the suitcase.

All this happened in my city this past week.

My first thought when I read the story in my hometown newspaper, The New Haven Register, was: how big a suitcase was it?

I’ve had all kinds of suitcases in my life, but none of them, except maybe one, have been roomy enough to fit a 27-year-old woman. The article said nothing about the woman being a midget. So I assume she was regular size, if perhaps petite. But still, what size do you have to be to fit inside a suitcase?

In fact, how do you put someone in a suitcase who’s alive, awake, and doesn’t want to go into the suitcase? It can’t be easy. I guess you could always tie them up with socks.

The woman, and the guy, who’s 42, used to live together, but it didn’t work out. He was already married, but that didn’t stop them. It worked ok long enough for him to get her pregnant with the boy who’s now nine months old.

What must the little boy have been thinking when he saw his mother disappear into a suitcase? This is not something a little boy should have to see: his “dad” shoving his mom into a suitcase against her will. This is not a wholesome family memory.

The woman had a protective order against the guy for a while, but it only lasted 14 days. She couldn’t get it renewed because she didn’t have a permanent address for him. That’s how the law works. Never mind that the woman was in danger. If the guy doesn’t have a permanent address, then the woman is on her own. Tough luck.

But apparently the guy was still living with his wife — at least, sometimes. You’d think they could use that address.

The woman was at a diaper bank here in the city when all these incidents took place this past week. He showed up because he says she told him she’d be there and that he should come to see her. That’s his story.

When they left the diaper bank and she got into her car, he forced his way inside and pushed her into the passenger’s seat and drove off.

He drove them to where his wife lives. And it was there that the guy went about stuffing the woman into the suitcase. After the woman had been inside the suitcase for a while, she heard someone come into the apartment and figured it was the guy’s wife. She shouted for help, but no one responded.

The guy eventually let her out after “a long time,” according to the police report.

Meanwhile, the police had been called by relatives and told the woman was missing. The police went looking for her and finally found all three of them later that day: the guy, the woman, and her baby. They were parked in an SUV. He was asleep. The woman and baby were awake and sitting in the car.

Why the woman and her baby remained in the SUV is not explained. Perhaps she was too traumatized to move. Who could blame her? She sounds too fragile to move on her own. Life is kicking the crap out of her. Now she has a baby to care for, at a time when she can’t even take care of herself.

A relative says the woman was beaten so much by the guy that, “she doesn’t even look like a person.”

The guy has been arrested and charged with risk of injury to a minor and unlawful restraint. More charges are expected to be filed, according to the newspaper.

Meanwhile, the status of the suitcase remains unclear.

So does the future of the little boy and the prospects for his pulverized mother.

But now there’s hardly any snow left. Just a few small patches here and there, and nothing in the backyard. I haven’t had to wear boots for the past three days. It’s even been warmer than you’d expect for this time of year.

That’s the way I like it. No snow and moderate temperatures in the middle of winter. If this is global warming in action, I’ll take it.

Of course, when it comes to weather, I have to take it, whether I like it or not. It’s not as if I have a choice. Unless I choose to move to another climate, which I don’t.

We had a day and a half of rain after the snow, and it melted most of the accumulation. It was as if Nature was tidying up after itself. Now I look out the window and see a clear sidewalk and street and an open field of green and brown grass across the street.

Eight inches of snow gone, just like that. Everything has changed in just a few days. Coming and going is easy now.

I hired a couple of young men on Saturday, after the snow stopped, to dig out my car and the two cars of my landlord upstairs. One of the fellows gave me his cell phone number, so I can call him the next time it snows. His name is Emanuel.

Hallelujah.

Now I drive to my Yale-New Haven Hospital cardiac rehabilitation gym in Branford as if it were early spring.

I feel healthy and strong and less jumpy about mysterious sensations in my body. I go to the gym three times a week and work out on the treadmill and the exercise bicycle and a machine that I rotate with my arms, first forward and then backwards. I do strength and stretch exercises for my legs and back and pelvis. I lift hand weights and do squats and arm curls for my arms.

The whole routine takes about an hour and a half. I wear a monitor that keeps tabs on my heart. The medical attendants also keep taking my blood pressure while I’m exercising to make sure my heart is working okay.

It’s good for my body and my morale. Maybe I’m going to be ok, after all. I have two more months of this exercise rehabilitation. By the time I finish, I could be in better physical shape than I’ve been in 20 years.

But I don’t want to get ahead of myself. I’m still taking heart medicine and will keep taking it for the rest of my life. I can’t claim all the good test results for myself. Those new chemicals change the way things work in my body now.

The thing is, my heart is undamaged. I did not have a heart attack last November. I had an artery “attack.” So the medication is as much about keeping my arteries clean as it is about protecting my heart.

But still, I recognize that none of the medication makes me younger. I’m still older than I was two months ago, when all this angioplasty and stenting took place. An aging body is still an aging body, no matter how many beta-blockers or aspirin or statins I take. I am not sipping from the fountain of youth. I am gulping from the pill machine of chemical companies.

I’m just hoping I can bob and weave and shadow box long enough to live another 20 years. If I do, I will be an old, old geezer at that age.

But to reach that age, I would have to live way beyond the average life expectancy of Americans today. Right now, according to figures in the 2012 World Almanac, my life expectancy, based on my current age, has at best another 10 to 11 years to run. Statistically, I’m down to my last decade. I’m hoping to almost double that. Good luck.

But at least now, I feel that maybe I’m not as fragile as I felt two months ago. And that’s good. It’s one of the main goals of the rehabilitation.

That’s doesn’t mean I won’t keel over tonight or tomorrow. Or that a Mack truck won’t slam into me on I 95, as I head for the cardiac gym three times a week. Or that some punk won’t shoot me or knife me in the street and steal my wallet and my cell phone, as happens a lot to people in American cities nowadays.

Killings and house break-ins are on the rise. That happens when hard times make people more desperate than usual. At some point, they say to hell with it, and grab a gun or a knife and go hunting for human targets. Except, of course, for the hardcore criminals, who prey on people regardless of the Gross National Product. Not every crook is trying to put food on the table for his family. Some are just bad people deep down.

Nobody said life was easy — unless you’re Mitt Romney or Queen Elizabeth. But even Mitt and the Queen will one day keel over, not from a gunshot or a knife wound or starvation or a drug overdose, but from the exhaustion of their life expectancy. They will have fallen off their chart. They will have run out of rising expectations. Just like the rest of us will.

Beta-blockers and treadmills can only carry us so far.

But in the end, it’s all snow one way or the other. The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary says that snow is “the frozen moisture of the atmosphere, composed of minute hexagonal ice crystals and usually aggregated in feathery white flakes.”

That’s the way I see it, too.

It’s snowing right now as I look out the window. It started snowing lightly after midnight and then picked up speed and heft later in the early morning. So by the time I got up shortly after six o’clock, the snow had already laid down an even coat of itself. Since then, the snow has kept up its pace of sprinkling minute hexagonal ice crystals all over the place and by now has laid down about four inches.

Yesterday, I heard reports that along the coastline where I live, the total amount would be between 3 and 5 inches or 4 to 7 inches. Judging from what I see out my window, I’d say both estimates were a little short. It looks as if the range will turn out to be closer to 7 to 8 inches and maybe more. I hate to think of that “maybe more” part.

I haven’t listened to weather reports this morning. It’s too late. I’m stuck with whatever snow falls on the ground outside my apartment. There’s nothing I can do at this point except watch it fall. And the forecasts yesterday got the amounts wrong, anyway, so I don’t trust them.

Ordinarily, I’d enjoy watching the snow fall. It’s beautiful in the way it scatters across the landscape like fine Irish lace. That’s if you’re watching it from inside a warm and comfortable room. If you’re stuck outside, the beauty is not quite so evident. Outside, the snow is less like Irish lace and more like icy pinpricks.

And if you’re a homeless person or a homeless dog or cat, the snow is nothing but awful. There is no charm in being homeless in the snow. You are cold and wet and perhaps hungry and no doubt lonely. And you have no prospects for things getting better anytime soon. You must endure the snow and hope you can find a fairly dry if not altogether warm space to crawl into.

But I am not homeless, thank God, and have no dog to walk. So I can hunker down inside my apartment and watch the snow fall, and I can drink a warm drink and feel snug and safe. I have the luxury of watching Irish lace fall from heaven.

This is New England. So of course we get snow in the winter, unlike my friend Michael in San Francisco or my cousin John in Florida, who never see snow. They never feel the charm or the pain of having snow overtake their lives. Their view of winter is different from mine. For them, winter is just another season. For me, winter can be a bully.

Right now, I’m at the passive stage. I can sit here and watch the snow fall. I am comfortable, dry, safe, and content. I have enough of everything I need: electricity, heating oil, food, drink, pills. I could stay inside here for a week and be just fine.

But eventually the snow will stop falling and the sky will clear and I will have to do something about reemerging into the outside world. And that’s where the trouble will begin. That’s what I most hate about snow: the aftermath. The time when the Irish lace suddenly turns into a heap of dead crystals. When the poetry of metaphor turns into the prose of impediment.

For many decades, ever since I was a youngster, I have dealt with the snow, winter after winter, in the usual way: sweep it, brush it, push it, and shovel it. Mainly shovel it. That’s what I did last year. That’s what I did this past October, when we had that freak snow storm that caused havoc throughout New England.

That October storm arrived while there were still leaves on the trees. The weight of the wet snow on those leaves caused thousands of trees to keel over and take down power lines with them. I was without power for three days. Other people were without power for weeks.

That was three months ago — exactly 12 weeks ago this very day — and we’ve had no snow since. So we’ve been lucky. Until today. And now Nature is balancing the books with this “ordinary” but still hefty and oppressive snow storm — a storm worse than was predicted yesterday, and still going strong, as I write.

The difference for me is that I will have to find a way to shovel away the storm without my actually shoveling it. I shoveled it in October. But then a month later, I had two cardiac catheterizations and the implanting of three stents inside three of my heart arteries. I’ve since been told by my cardiologist not to shovel snow anymore. My heart seems to be okay, but I still have “coronary heart disease.”

And coronary heart disease and snow shoveling are bad bed fellows. You might say they are cousins of matter and anti-matter. And you know what happens when matter and anti-matter meet.

So for me to shovel snow is not a good idea. I asked my cardiologist if I could push the snow with my shovel, instead of actually lift it. I don’t think a patient had ever asked them that question before, and he hesitated. We quibbled together. Pushing was not as bad as lifting, but he didn’t trust me not to lift. And so we let the quibble dangle in midair.

I will have to hope that someone will come by, as they often do after a snow storm here in the city and offer, for a price, to shovel my car out of its snowy cocoon. I will gladly pay to have it done. I’ve paid before to have my car shoveled out, back when I was still wielding my own shovel. That was a luxury. Now it’s a necessity.

Snow, I’m sad to say, has suddenly lost some of its innocence. I can still enjoy it from a distance. But now it is a new threat to me as soon as I leave the safety of my domestic bell jar.

I can enjoy watching it fall — which it continues to do with renewed strength here at midday. I can enjoy writing about it, photographing it, feeling snug on the other side of glass from it. But I am now threatened by it in ways I’ve never felt before.

The snow is still snow. It hasn’t changed. It is what it is. I’m the one who has changed, and not for the better.

That’s not the snow’s fault. The snow has been doing what it does for a million years. I just came along in this span of my lifetime to engage with it the best way I could. And for decades, that was good enough.

A lot in my life was good enough for decades.

But now what was good for a long time is under review. That’s what getting old is. It’s a review of what was good once upon a time. It’s a revision of my program. It’s an overhaul of my expectations.

Snow fell long before I was born and will fall long after I’m gone. It will look pretty much the same as it does now. It always has. I remember in detail how it looked when I was 8 years old and living in the country with my mother and my grandparents.

I remember how it clung to the roof of the house and to the second floor dormer windows and how one Christmas morning, Santa’s sleigh marks made tracks in the snow around the chimney.

I remember that and many of the other snow storms that have come and gone in all the decades of my life since then.

Today’s storm is just one more reminder that I am simply passing through.

Santa’s sleigh marks don’t last forever.

The program doesn’t focus on life on Earth. It looks at the reality of stuff everywhere else. It explores life beyond Earth — the suns and moons and various stars and galaxies and white dwarfs and super-novas and all the objects and energy and invisible forces that exists in one form or another way out beyond our tiny moon and our mediocre Sun.

Thus, the name “Wormhole.” It takes the viewer through a kind of metaphorical wormhole so we can travel through the universe way beyond our puny solar system.

The program is fact-driven. This is not Star Trek fantasy. This is factual knowledge that astronomers and planetary scientists have developed over the years. Much of the program features interviews with leading astronomers and other scientists doing current research.

We see photographs from satellites and rocket probes. We get close-ups of computer scans and exquisite telescopic images. We get diagrams and computer models. And we see and hear what the leading astronomers have to say about it all.

Each hour program, intelligently narrated by actor Morgan Freeman, focuses on one aspect of life way out there.

But that’s part of the fascination. Although each program looks at a different aspect of cosmic reality, you’re reminded again and again that you’re part of that reality. All that stuff out there is part of the process that shapes all the stuff here on Earth. We are part of that drama. We are not immune to the push and pull of galactic forces.

Out there is our history and our future, just as much as it’s the past and future of the Andromeda galaxy and all the trillions of other galaxies throughout the ever-widening dimensions of the universe.

It is our story, not just their story. We do not live in isolation here on Earth, as much as our history would like us to believe we do.

The trouble is that we still order our lives around ancient stories and myths and self-aggrandizing attitudes that date back two and three thousand years, when people thought the Earth was flat and that the Sun circled around the Earth.

We bask in those errors because they flatter us. They make us seem as if we’re the center of the universe. In fact, for thousands of years, we thought exactly that: That we were God’s gift to the universe and that everything else out there was just background noise.

Our religious books keep telling us that we’re such Big Shots that God devotes His entire attention to us. We are the only planet worth His time of day, and humans are the only species that matters. End of story.

It’s all about us.

Us, us, us. We, we, we.

We still take much of what we call truth from the wrong-headed tales and superstitions and prejudices of ignorant peasants and stupid emperors and conniving ideologies. We cling to our faith in these lies and mistakes and cynical distortions because we’re used to them and because they give us some kind of infantile comfort in the face of our inevitable extinction.

And yet, I contend that the more we observe and learn about the rest of the cosmos, the more convoluted that creation appears and the more simple-minded our human perspective in describing it. We are still children trying to understand the complex “adult” world of everything that’s not us.

If nothing else, the cosmos teaches us humility. It stops us from walking around like know-it-alls, making snap judgments based on whatever the oldest faith or the latest theory makes us look good.

As for humility: Last night I learned on a “Wormhole” program that everything we can see — everything that has atoms and stuff that we can actually look at as “matter,” only makes up about 5 percent of the universe.

In other words, the visual world of the cosmos is only 5 percent of what makes the cosmos look like the cosmos.

What we can perceive is only a tiny bit of what’s out there. The rest of the cosmos is made of about 20 percent of Black Matter and 70 percent of Black Energy — neither of which we can see or understand.

It’s called Black Matter and Black Energy because we can’t see it or figure it out. We know it’s there because of the way it affects the parts of the universe that we can see. Black Matter affects the gravity of objects we can see. And Black Energy — in some ways, even more mysterious — acts in opposition to the gravity of Black Matter.

Black Matter tries to keep the universe organized into gravitational patterns. Black Energy does the opposite. It pushes things apart. And since there’s so much more Black Energy, it seems to be winning the battle, because the universe is expanding faster and faster — being pushed farther and farther apart from the stuff that makes it up. The energy is overcoming the gravity.

So it would seem that the universe, instead of one day collapsing in on itself, as was once thought would happen, will, in fact, spread everything so far apart that everything will eventually . . . disappear. Everything will become more and more isolated from everything else.

Even the electrons around a nucleus of an atom will be pushed away by this massive Black Energy. Which means that atoms themselves will disintegrate. The very stuff of matter will disappear.

How do you like that for a scenario?

How do you like your blue-eyed boy now, Mister Death? as poet E.E. Cummings famously asked in his poem, “Buffalo Bill’s.”

What does all this have to do with you and me? Nothing. Unless of course, you happen to live in this particular universe.

In that case, you probably should make other plans about your stairway to Heaven. People who believe that bodies and souls will reunite in the afterlife could be in for a rude awakening.

It may be time to write another creation myth in which eternal life comes equipped with an asterisk.

My previous piece, “The Illusion of a New Calendar,” attracted more than a hundred readers. The one after that, “The Sky Above, The Mud Below,” attracted a mere 52. And that’s after the piece was posted for seven days.

Happy New Year.

And that turning away happened right after I had laid on all the statistics for the whole of 2011, detailing all those readers on all those continents.

Oh, well. What does it matter? People come and people go.

What’s the point?

Maybe you’re all out there reading something far more interesting, like the collected works of Mitt Romney or Rick Santorum. The important thing to remember is that Greed is Good. If you’re not going to read me — and who can blame you — at least you should read guys who can do you some good and refresh your capitalist instincts.

Isn’t that what Jesus said? Greed is good and don’t apologize for stepping on the little guy?

All those conservative Christians can’t wait to fill their pockets with good, old fashioned Republican cash. Fill those pockets. Fire all those useless workers. Get the liberal bleeding hearts out of the public square. Bring back good old ‘merican Get-Yours Capitalism.

Just as Jesus said in his Sermon on the Mount. “Blessed are those who make a lot of money and who tell the poor to stop being lazy and get a goddamn job,” he said. “For the rich are the angels of the marketplace. And the marketplace is a reflection of heavenly Heaven. Sharing is for suckers. Justice is for losers.”

Or am I reading from the wrong bible? Did Jesus actually give a damn about the poor? Was Jesus a capitalist or a socialist? Why do the religious fanatics of today never — and I mean never — mention the Sermon on the Mount? That’s because it doesn’t fit in with their aggressive, take-no-prisoners style of sanctimony.

It’s enough to drive me into permanent exile. Not in another country, but inside my own little private bell jar.

I watch the news on television and listen to talk shows and I cringe. I listen to the so-called leaders and wanna-be leaders and my heart sinks. I cannot remember a period in my life when stupidity was so rampant and so public, and frustration so hostile and vicious.

At least the aggressive and loud 1960s and early-’70’s had their hearts in the right place. Their brains were on fire. Their focus was on peace and justice. And their rhetoric was expressed on a witty and often poetic level.

By contrast, we today have entered a period as intellectually dark as the Dark Ages and as morally hypocritical as the Gilded 19^th Century. There is a brutality in the air that batters sensibility into submission. It’s difficult to have a discussion about politics or economics or sexuality or — God help us — religion, without the talk turning aggressively belligerent or mindlessly rigid.

I feel I’m trapped in a madhouse, with wild-eyed fanatics on all sides, screaming at each other. The air is so volatile with hate that I can imagine a wave of high-profile murders suddenly erupting nationwide in a convulsion of self-righteous bloodletting and religious mayhem.

Reason has become a liability, compromise a sign of weakness. Truth is a beggar in a clown’s suit.

None of this will end well.

Meanwhile, most of Europe is falling apart and the Middle East continues to mangle its own people.

There is no safe, reasonable place on earth anymore except, perhaps, in English-speaking Canada, where nothing really important ever happens. Or in Denmark, which is too small to matter and too independent to care.

Every place else remains on the brink of a nervous breakdown, with outrage the drug of choice.

You can be riding along in your life for the longest time, feeling fine and going about your daily business. And then suddenly a piece of mortality falls on top of you and you’re reminded in a very specific way that, no matter how fine you feel, you’re basically doomed.

The abstract idea that you won’t live forever and probably won’t even make it to 100, suddenly takes on a more concrete and compelling reality.

The abstract notion suddenly turns three-dimensional and very personal. You no longer discuss existentialism with Sartre and Camus — both of whom are dead — and instead focus your attention on five pills in the morning and three more at night.

I am feeling pretty good now. I have attended six exercise sessions at the cardiac rehabilitation center. I have increased my exercise rate on the treadmill, the exercise bicycle, the arm pushing-and-pulling machine, and with the different weights for my arm stretching and curling, not to mention the leg swings and the body squats and the leg and back stretches.

Two or three times a week, I go to the center and work out for nearly an hour and a half, with the hands-on attention of medical staff who keep checking my blood pressure.

I never did have a heart attack. My heart seems to be fine and undamaged. What went wrong was that two of my heart arteries clogged up with plaque to more than 90 percent and cut down on the blood flow to my heart. But the arteries were fixed with angioplasty and stents before they could do real damage to my heart. Now I have three stents in those arteries.

The exercise is recommended because of the whole cardiac structure and the need to strengthen what may have been weak and to help prevent what may be a future problem. I’ll keep up this special exercise program for the next three months.

Assuming I’m still alive after that, I’ll then sign up for future exercises at a gym at a nearby college. No, not Yale, but at a smaller college, Albertus Magnus.

So my focus has become much more physical lately. And yet, being the intellectual person I am, I still can’t help thinking about the Milky Way. I may be living a more grounded life down here in the mud below. But my fascination with the sky above continues to captivate and even astonish me.

Of course, what happens up there will eventually affect what happens down here. But probably not while I’m alive. At least not in the body I currently have.

I don’t believe in reincarnation. But if the basic law of science is correct and matter can neither be created nor destroyed, then my cremated remains will live on in some molecular form long into the future.

My calcium molecules may end up in the digestive system of a blue jay or a sand shark. My protein may be part of the muscle mass of a Labrador or Border Collie. My calcium may find its way into the wings of a Monarch Butterfly. Who knows?

The reason I plan to be cremated, instead of laid in a water-proof box, is that I want my body stuff to get back into the mix of things as soon as possible.

Meanwhile, there’s that looming black hole sucking up everything in the center of our Milky Way galaxy. In a short article in the New York Times last month, the Times reported that the black hole — called Sagittarius A* (“pronounced A-star”) has such a strong gravitational pull, that it “will eventually consume everything in the galaxy.”

Insofar as they can measure such a thing, scientists estimate that the black hole in our galaxy — and every galaxy has one — is the size of about four million suns.

Scientists are currently watching a large cold gas cloud heading directly toward the black hole at a speed of about 1,000 miles per second. In about a year, that cloud will pass the so-called “event horizon” — the point where there’s no turning back.

It will be the first time that scientists will actually watch something being swallowed by a black hole.

But that’s just one gas cloud. When you consider all the tens of millions of suns and planets and moons and all the other stuff in the Milky Way — all of that will eventually disappear into that one black hole.

Everything — the Earth, our Sun, Mars, Venus, and all the other planets, plus all the other stars in just our one galaxy — will disappear in one big, final gulp. All gone.

I find that devastatingly fascinating. It is definitely a Holy Cow moment!

And so even our deaths will disappear and all the so-called indestructible matter of the galaxy.

A reality like that sure plays hell with all the creation myths lying at the heart of our subconscious and our holy books. This is deep thinking of the most catastrophic kind.

Lucky for us that we’re so superficial and narcissistic that we think the only thing that matters is our one puny life. Eat those pills. Run on that treadmill. Avoid cholesterol. Drink more water.

Do all that, and you may last another year or two or ten or even 20. And that’s enough to focus on and to ward off the dread of the Nothingness to Come.

Keep it simple. Keep focused on the foreground. Walk one step at a time. Sit by the sea and watch the gulls circle the lighthouse.

Just be careful about looking up at the sky above. There’s no future up there, despite all the daydreams about space travel.

Stick to the Earth. Walk in the mud. Have another glass of wine.

Don’t worry. The black hole will take care of everything else.

The only question is: What happens to all the stuff inside the black hole?

And is there an opening at the other end?

Before we disappear completely, perhaps we should concoct a new creation myth to help us cope with our eventual obliteration.

I figured that my life would unfold, month by month, more or less with its usual comfortable regularity. It wouldn’t repeat every detail of the year before, thank God. That would be torture, or as Kurt Vonnegut wrote in his novel, “Time Quake,” a freak in Nature’s time-space continuum. But I took it for granted that my basic pattern would remain pretty much stable. And for the most part it did.

But then came November and my chest pain and my clogged arteries and the two catheterizations in the hospital and the angioplasties and the three stents. And then came the new pills. And now there’s my cardiac rehabilitation three times a week for the next three months, with me running on a treadmill, pedaling on an exercise bicycle, exercising my arms on a special arm-twisting machine, and lifting weights and stretching my legs and back and soon pulling a weight that’s a little like rowing a boat.

None of that crossed my mind a year ago when I hung my new calendar.

This year was different. When I hung my 2012 calendar yesterday, I was more humble and wary and a little more uncertain about what‘s happening now, let alone what might happen next week, next month or next November. Age will sometimes do that to a person, and also recent events.

Any sensible person knows that hanging a calendar on a wall doesn’t guarantee you anything, despite the easy turning of each month’s page. And yet, unless something dramatic happens that you didn’t expect and that maybe threatens your life or your well-being, you hang the new calendar with a kind of innocent, naïve stupidity.

We live one day at a time, one hour at a time, one minute at a time. But we hang a calendar one year at a time. Our wall calendar is like a new pasture. We hang January on the wall — in my case, along with the month’s reproduction of Van Gogh’s painting, “Still Life with a Plate of Onions” — and we feel we have a whole expansive year at our disposal. We’ve got all these days and weeks and months ahead of us for riding across the life we think we’ve defined and to a large part control.

The calendar is brand new and so is our naiveté. We think we won’t grow older until our birthday arrives in June, with Van Gogh’s 1889 self-portrait. Until then, the days just slip by and add up and life goes on and on.

As long as the calendar has more pages to turn, we’re fine. My new calendar is like my new lease on life. Look. It’s only January 2. I still have 364 days to go. That’s plenty of time. And then I’ll hang up a new calendar next year, with more days to live and to chart and to pass.

As long as I can keep hanging up a new calendar each January, I’m safe. Except for that day in June, when my birthday arrives each year and stares at me like Poe’s raven.

That’s when I pause for a minute or two and wonder if maybe there’s more to time than what appears on a calendar, and more intimidation in a raven’s look than is to be found in mere poetry.

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Speaking of time, the Word Press people, who host my blog, sent me the year-end totals for activity on my site in 2011.

I had 5,900 visits to my site in 2011, and the readers came from six continents: North America, Europe, Asia, South America, Africa, and Oceania.

In North America, 99.9% were from the U.S., with 0.1% from Mexico. In Europe, 68.8% were from France, 14.6% from the U.K., 11.6% from Croatia, and only .5% from Russia.

Of the readers in Asia, 26.9% were from Indonesia, 23.1% from India, 15.4% from Thailand, and 7.7% each from China and South Korea.

In South America, 75% of the readers were from Brazil, and 25% from Argentina. In Africa, 33.3% came from each of South Africa, and Kenya, as well as Egypt in the Middle East. And in Oceania, 50% were in Papua New Guinea and 50% in New Caledonia.

All of which pleases me and to some degree, confounds me. I am both surprised and astonished.

And I am grateful to you all for dropping by to see what I’ve written and for sticking around to see what’s next.

It’s thanks to you and to other readers that I keep doing what I’m doing — such as it is. I suppose I’ll just keep writing away here for the time being — or until I run out of Van Gogh’s onions.

What?!!!

“Dear Home Delivery Subscriber,” the e-mail began. “Our records indicate that you recently requested to cancel your home delivery subscription. Please keep in mind when your delivery service ends, you will no longer have unlimited access to NYTimes.com and our NYTimes apps.

“We do hope you’ll reconsider.”

What in hell are you talking about, I shouted. I haven’t canceled the Times, you idiots. I rely on the Times every morning, as I sit down to breakfast. The Times is my window into the world and the galaxies beyond. I need the Times as much as I need my daily beta-blocker. You stop delivering my Times and I’ll keel over from sheer intellectual nosebleed.

The Times e-mail went on to try to entice me back with a special offer of 50 percent off for the next 16 weeks. It then said that if I wanted to continue my subscription and take advantage of this special deal, all I had to do was call the number listed at end of the e-mail.

So I called that number and called that number and called that number and called other New York Times numbers and even tried to send a fax to the newspaper’s fax number. But the lines were always busy-busy-busy. And the Home Delivery access box on the Times website was inaccessible.

I must have launched at least 25-30 telephone calls to the newspaper throughout the afternoon and either got a busy signal or a recorded message telling me to call back later.

It ruined my whole afternoon. The email arrived at 1:09 PM, and for the next three and a half hours, I tried desperately to reach the Times to tell it not to cancel my home delivery.

I even destroyed my tea kettle in the process.

I had turned on my gas burner earlier in the afternoon to heat some water for my Cafix drink, which is a coffee substitute. But then I was so distracted by my attempts to reach the Times that I forgot all about the water and the stove and the kettle. And suddenly I smelled metal burning. My tea kettle was empty and scalded and dark inside. And the stink of burning metal filled my kitchen and the adjoining rooms.

I had to go out immediately and buy another kettle. And when I came home, I lit three scented candles and placed them strategically around my apartment to kill the bad smell. The scent, appropriately enough, was “hemlock.” The smell of burning metal gave way to the herb that killed Socrates.

I even called the company that actually hand delivers the Times and the New Haven Register to me each morning, seven days a week. I left a message on their voice machine saying that they should ignore any notice they may receive from the Times saying my subscription was canceled. “Please keep bringing me the New York Times every morning, ” I said. “I have not canceled my subscription.”

Finally, I sat down and wrote and printed a letter to the Times and placed it in an envelope and put a first-class stamp on it. I explained everything in the letter that I had tried to tell the idiots at the Times in my futile phone calls.

Little did I know that I was only one of eight million other Times subscribers who had received the same message. It had all been a mistake.

At 4:32 PM, three and a half hours after the first email, the sent me another e-mail that said, “Dear New York Times Reader, You may have received an e-mail today from The New York Times with the subject line ‘Important information regarding your subscription.’ This e-mail was sent by us in error. Please disregard the message. We apologize for any confusion this may have caused.”

Confusion? You screwed up my whole afternoon, New York Times. You wasted my time, kept me from doing more important things, and even cost me the price of a new tea kettle. And I’m still recovering from my coronary heart disease, and had just finished a rehabilitation session earlier that day. Your mistaken e-mail kicked me while I was down.

And you just apologize for “any confusion” you may have caused ! I’d say you did worse than that.

This morning’s print edition of the newspaper — which I received on my front porch on time — printed a small notice on the front page noting the mistaken e-mail and directing readers to a larger story on the subject on Page B3. It was in that story on B3 that I learned there were 8 million of us who were flummoxed by the first Times e-mail.

When the Times screws up, it screws up big time.

I’m just glad I didn’t end up in the emergency room.

I read the Times first, except for the front-page news section, which I save for last.

But before I read any of the news or arts or sports or business sections of either newspaper, I always begin with the comics — or as we of a certain generation used to call them, “the funny papers.”

Every morning, I place the colorful funny papers on top of all the other sections. But I only read three of the comic strips, and in this order: Peanuts, Get Fuzzy, and Doonesbury. All the other strips are pretty dumb. I no longer even bother to look at them. But those three that I do read are really good. They’re well drawn and intelligently thought out and often witty and satiric and sometimes rather moving.

Charles Schulz who drew Peanuts for decades (often referred to as the ‘Charlie Brown’ strip.) died some years ago. And so the Peanuts strips that are printed now are so-called classic repeats from Schulz’s vast portfolio.

Earlier this week, the Peanuts strip featured Linus getting ready to be in the Christmas play at his grammar school. He tells Snoopy (the dog), “I’m going to be a shepherd in the Christmas play, Snoopy. This is the piece I have to memorize . . . ‘And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.’ In the last panel, Linus looks at Snoopy and says, “That’s a good line. I wonder who wrote it.”

I agreed. That is a good line. It’s a wonderful line. It packs a lot of information into a few words, and does so with such simple grace, perfect rhythm, and a strong visual sense. All that in just 19 plain and quietly poetic words.

I, too, wondered who wrote it. Obviously, it was the work of one of the four Gospel writers. But was it Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John?

So I got out my various bibles to look. The first thing I discovered was that it was Luke who wrote the line. It’s in Chapter 2, verse 8. But the words in the first bible I checked were not exactly the same as those quoted by Linus. In the New Revised Standard Version, published by the American Bible Society, the verse says this: “In that region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night.” That’s a very straight-forward but basically banal sentence, lacking both grace and poetry.

So I then checked my copy of The Jerusalem Bible, which is based on the revised French 1961 edition, La Bible de Jerusalem. This version was put together by Catholic scholars and priests and even comes equipped with a Nihil Obstat on the copyright page, which shows that the text meets with the approval of the Catholic Church.

But this version of Luke’s verse was even more clumsy and leaden than the Protestant’s New Revised Standard Version. “In the countryside,” it reads, “close by there were shepherds who lived in the fields and took it in turns to watch their flocks during the night.”

Awkward and graceless and too abstract.

Then I checked my copy of the Saint Joseph Daily Missal, which my step-father gave me 50 years ago, and which for many decades was the most popular and useful book for Catholics attending Latin mass.

The Saint Joseph Missal has a different biblical reading for each day of the year. The one for midnight mass on Christmas day is, as you might expect, from chapter 2 in Luke. It translates the verse in question this way: “And there were shepherds in the same district living in the fields and keeping watch over their flock by night.”

That’s better than The Jerusalem Bible and is a little more graceful than the Revised Standard Version. But it still lacks the grace and poetic symmetry of the line that Linus quotes.

So I figured that the beautiful Linus speech must come from the King James version of the bible. It’s generally agreed that the King James Version has the highest literary quality of all the bibles. It’s the version that inspired writers like Hemingway and Faulkner. Its language combines simplicity with poetry, and directness with a story-telling narrative that unfolds with an urgent sense of the sacred.

So I went to the Yale Barnes and Noble Bookstore and looked through a copy of the Authorized King James Version. And sure enough, there was Linus’s speech, just the way it was printed in Peanuts.

I bought the paperback version published by Oxford University Press, and have it here on my desk. I now have three-and-a-half bibles, all of them slightly different in language and tone. I guess when it comes to God’s word, a little leeway is built into the language. And why not? These English translations come at the end of 2,000 years of writing, rewriting, translating, retranslating, scholarship, arguments, fiats, denunciations, wars, blood baths, excommunications, and partitions.

It’s hard to find one religious book that will satisfy every partisan taste in the headlong pursuit of a personal god. The least we can do is elevate the language of religion and try to match the words and style of belief with the narrative ambitions of a sacred text.

And besides, I think that shepherds “abiding in the field” are a lot more sensitive to the possibility of miracles than shepherds who are merely “living” there.

I, meanwhile, still have things to do. Only this year, I get to do them with coronary heart disease.

Little by little, I am getting my strength back. But the muscle knot next to my left scapula still makes me nervous, because it causes the connecting muscles in my left arm to feel stressed. And then I start wondering if what I’m feeling is angina and whether I should go to the emergency room. Blah, blah, blah.

And then gradually I relax and the panic quiets down until next time.

Next Tuesday, I go to my first exercise session at the Yale-New Haven Hospital cardiac rehabilitation center in Branford. I went last Wednesday for my initial non-exercise meeting with the staff and with one of the doctors. I filled out forms and underwent measurement tests and told them what I’ve been going through. They’ve heard it all before and said I should do fine.

When medical people say I should do fine, I feel that maybe they don’t see the clear picture. After all, what happened to me — especially with the second catheterization — is highly unusual. How do I know the unusual thing that happened then won’t happen again? How do they know?

The answer, of course, and that neither of us knows. But instead of staying frozen in ignorant anxiety, I try to do stuff that helps my body get healthy and gives me a better chance of living 10 or 20 more years.

The sad part is that even 10 or 20 years doesn’t sound like enough. Back when I was 30, 20 years was a given. Of course, I’d lived 20 more years. Of course, I’d live until I was 50. Of course, I’d live past 50 for another 20 years and reach 70. And it was true. I did all that.

But then you start running out of 20-year leaps. You pray for 20, but hope for 10. You pray for 10 and hope for 5. You pray for 5, and hope to see next Christmas.

It’s as if life is whittling you down like a hickory stick, shortening your leaps, curtailing your spans. You hardly have enough hickory in you now to go dowsing for water.

I will go to the center two to three times a week and will do that for three months. I will wear sneakers and sweat pants and a t-shirt and will be hooked up to a portable device that monitors my heart. I will exercise all parts of my body, including the use of weights to strengthen my arms and machines to work my legs and a treadmill and an exercise bicycle to work my heart. Each session will last a little more than an hour.

If I don’t keel over, I should be stronger and more durable in March than I am now. If I do keel over, there will be doctors in the room to watch me fall.

Everyone in that exercise room is there because something went haywire with their coronary arteries (like me) or with their hearts. We are all on special heart medications now. We use pills to compensate for our inadequacies. We ask our bodies to forgive our trespasses. We plead for mercy and beg for longevity.

Meanwhile, Christopher Hitchens dies at 62 of throat cancer. He succumbed without a yelp. He continued writing right up to the end and then let Hospice have its way.

When I was 62, I was still dreaming of 80.

I still am.

I’ll try to shop tomorrow and wrap things up and perhaps put a package in the mail on Monday.

After that, will come thoughts of the tree — what I call my “magic tree,” with all its tiny lights and its dangling, hand-painted ornaments from Poland — the same ornaments I’ve hung on Christmas branches for more than 40 years.

Rituals travel in circles, not straight lines. Christmas looks backward more than it looks ahead. It’s like the Moon or Monarch butterflies or maple syrup. The seasons pass and what was last year comes again. And again.

Time moves slower in a cycle, in a rhythmic ritual. You think more about the past than the future, more about connections than about endings.

You play music from the 16^th Century. You place the same old angel on the same old top of the same old tree.

You hardly notice time passing, because you’re doing the same old things you’ve done 70 times before.

The only difference is that now the past seems just a little farther away, and the future looks as if maybe it’s having second thoughts.