I was stacking wood Saturday when my plumber, Bud, stopped by. He was checking on the work of Loquacious Hank, his new subcontractor, who had replaced my kitchen ceiling. This related to the resolution of what Bud tactfully refers to as my plumbing “dilemmas,” which came with the house and never end.

We talked about Bud’s upcoming operation. Then we got on to mortality and the wake of his wife’s aunt.

Out of nowhere, Bud said, “I want to be burnt. I don’t want to be cold.”

I was disconcerted, until I realized he was talking about burial. I resisted the temptation to remind him that it was a knee operation.

“I know,” I replied.

I didn’t entirely agree with him, but I knew what he meant. I thought about the Farmingdale Cemetery, which I pass on the way to Augusta. In winter, the arms of granite angels stretch over trackless snow, pointing toward the river.

The shift toward spring, heralded by birds and light, has begun. Bud and I joke about baby boomer gestalt. We complain about colonoscopies and the irresponsibility of the younger working generation. Which is pretty hilarious, since I and my contemporaries didn’t begin to have even a vague grip on life until we were in our thirties.

At this age comes the realization that one will not have as amazing a life as one may have thought—such as the kind of life limned in the fraudulent memoirs that I mentioned in my last post. Instead, one will probably continue to have an ordinary life, where the future, as the poet Wes McNair notes, will be “the same / struggle of wishes and losses, and hope, / that old lieutenant, picking us up / every so often to dust us off and adjust / our helmets.”

In the April 7 New Yorker, I read, “Mine Is Longer Than Yours: The Last Boomer Game,” by Michael Kinsley, an essay mostly about the boomer quest for longevity.

“Be as greedy and self-centered as you want,” Kinsley writes. “The only competition that matters in the end is about life itself.”

The piece left me cold, partly because of the tone, partly because it pertained mainly to affluent lives, those of Americans who have the resources to pursue heli-skiing, trips to Nepal and all the other creative, interesting things we must do to stave off aging and continue our specialness.

I turned gratefully back to Jim Harrison’s 2007 novel, Returning to Earth, which is about Donald, a middle aged Chippewa-Finnish man who is dying of Lou Gehrig’s disease. He is an honorable, quiet man, who reminds me of a lot of people I know in Central Maine. People here still hunt and fish and their family histories, like Donald’s, are greatly connected to the hard, miraculous earth. The book is about that as well as an undercurrent of redemptive possibilities. And it is about Native American religion in a plain spoken, thankfully non-New Age way.

Bud decides to leave to go fishing. “What do you catch now?” I ask. “Smelt,” he says.

It’s always smelt. Then he starts talking about sturgeon. The fish is Gardiner, Maine’s symbol; the Kennebec once teamed with them. Sturgeon, which first appeared in the fossil record 200 million years ago, are “anadromous bottom feeders,” ugly as sin.

“Me and Diane saw one once,” Bud said. “We used to do a lot of boating when the kids were little. It leapt up by the bridge in the moonlight. Must have been twelve feet long.”

He chuckled as he looked at me.

“We were scared,” he said, “so we went right on home.”

That’s what I want in memoir, I think. Not that the sudden appearance of the sturgeon means all that much, probably. But to muddle along in ordinary darkness, leaving the way open for an ancient surprise.