My spouse and I are… ahem… “middle aged” codgers. Having been together more than 20 years, our idea of nightlife includes…

Preparing a home-cooked meal which we now eat much earlier — about 5:00pm (1700). I arrive home from work about 3:45, so it is easy for me to prepare a meal and have it on the table by five.

After the thrill of dinner and cleaning up is over, sometimes I go to a community meeting, but most of the time these days, I do not have a meeting to attend so I look forward to staying home with my spouse.

We go down to our basement, which I finished as a project with my spouse about ten years ago. We may watch TV, or at my request — since I do not really care for television and its blathering brain-dead stuff — we read to each other.

Yeah… books. In print. On paper. With a binding. Who woulda thunk?

No tablet, e-reader, or computer. Real, honest-to-goodness books.

My spouse is an avid reader of history, and I enjoy that too, along with biographies, science, and good mystery novels.

Last night, for example, my spouse read aloud several pages of a book he was reading about (former U.S.) President Lyndon Johnson. He then had a discussion with me about what he thought about the excerpt. We had a great give-and-take dialogue.

I followed by reading an excerpt from a biography of Giulio Andreotti, a man who held the office of Prime Minister of Italy three times. Sr. Andreotti is an interesting character. I translated the section that I read into English as I was reading from the Italian. Then my spouse and I had an interesting conversation as well.

As night was drawing to a close, I pulled out a favorite book written by James Michner, titled “Chesapeake.” This book offers a historical picture of life in Maryland from times of early Native American settlement in the 1500s until the 1970s by following families, their lives, and livelihoods. What I selected, however, was a piece from “Voyage 8” (8th Chapter) about “Onk Or,” a goose and his mate. The chapter explains about how geese mate for life and makes you think like geese. It was a very moving, well-written, bedtime story.

With the closing of the book, we made our way to bed at our usual 8:30 (2030). 4am (0400) comes much earlier now, and we need our sleep — especially me since I am still working!

Life is short: enjoy reading to each other instead of mind-numbing television or other media.