I awoke at 4 AM today when the light came on in the bedroom, and what did I see but my other, rummaging in the room for the boxes for the Christmas decorations. I tried to get back to sleep, but if she couldn't sleep, I guess I couldn't either.

Removing the decorations at our house, both inside and out, is no small task. Her Christmas decorations take one very sizeable closet. The removal could have been done in a morning, I think, but because we worked together, it took all day. Go figure.

I took a photo of the last decoration, my favorite, a three-foot plank of advice that should probably hang in our home year round.

Apropos of pouting, my mind and fingers turn as they have lately to thoughts of William Frawley, who played Fred Mertz in the old "I Love Lucy" series from about 1951 to about 1960, and who later played in "My Three Sons" until shortly before his death in 1966.

I was reminded of him when I saw him in the holiday movie Miracle on 34th Street a week ago at the height of the Christmas frenzy.

I also thought of him because after my birthday, I was feeling...well, old. And when I was a kid, Frawley was the consummate old guy, a curmudgeon, the grouchy neighbor, the guy into whose yard you would be reluctant to trespass in order to retrieve an errant baseball or whiffle ball, a man who wouldn't toss a stray ball back from his yard to yours without some kind of cautionary remarks. He was not a man who might invite you into his yard to pick Japanese beetles off his roses -- an opportunity I would not have missed.

He was always dressed in slacks and a white shirt, I think. Never ever in play clothes -- at least not in the kind of clothing I as a child would have recognized as relaxed. I can't imagine him in PF Flyer's or Keds, for instance, and probably not in Hush Puppies either. No, polished black oxfords, probably navy issue, probably too tight, hard-rubber heels, leather soles -- that would have been his style.

And clean. He was clean in the hairless, just-shaved way that some old men have. He probably smelled of Mennan's, Barbasol, or Old Spice -- that generation.

But mostly, Frawley always looked old, older even than our parents, who are not often allowed to appear truly young in the eyes of their children.

And that worried me. The generational discrepancy in apparent age is probably as much a function of style or fashion as it might be of health or nutritional differences between generations, but still -- the realization that I might have reached the age that Frawley was when he played the old fart in those Lucy episodes began to gnaw at me. Did I look to kids like Frawley looked to me? And just how old was he when he played those fogyish roles?

So, off I went this morning to The Internet Movie Database, where I did a search on his last name and learned that he was born in 1887, making him 64 to 73 when he was performing in the Lucy shows. In other words, he was much older than I am now.

I feel better now.

I'll stop pouting about that age thing for a while. Fifty-two isn't so bad.

But it would probably pay to keep the sign up in the house.

Maybe another in the car.

How much could a billboard or two cost?

We were offline for a few hours in the afternoon. Eventually, tech services at our ISP wrote to say that the problem was with Qwest, their provider. Their e-mail was very clear, almost guiltily clear, that this was not a Y2K issue.

In the evening I watched the Fiesta Bowl. Tennessee vs. Nebraska, 21-31.