You know what they say: If you wait long enough, the same old broken-down trolley eventually comes rolling by again. So here I am. And it's nice to see you.

I'm sure you've noticed that I'm a little heavier than when we last spoke. Also, that I have less money, but more time, and I can tell that these are good things, because life seems more vivid these days. And the scales have fallen from my eyes. Or rather, some of them did. Two of them did.

The first scale to fall was that the world was coming to an end. I became convinced of this around the time Linda Tripp first appeared on the national radar. What a nightmare! And me with my bad nerves. She was so angry and scary, evil in its schlumpiest form, an overbred, overfed Airedale sicced on the American public. I barely held on. Then summer came and everyone else got happier with every home run Mark or Sammy hit, but I just felt odd, as if even the good things were now so exaggerated as to seem unreal. No one can hit 65 home runs; I mean, it was very disturbing. And things got worse -- the stock market, all those bombings. Then, hideously, a tie of 66 home runs. Sixty-six home runs! A tie! All of us codependents wanted to hang ourselves. Plus, it was so surreal, like the next thing you knew, the umpires would start letting batters have more than three strikes or something: "Hey, don't be so hard on yourselves! Orel, give him one more pitch." Still I sat glued to the TV in cobra hypnosis until late August, when I finally told a friend that the world might be coming to an end. He said that perhaps it was just the summer that was coming to an end. Also, that some of us would have made terrible cave men hysterics every night when the sun boiled back down into the sea.

He also reminded me of something Don Carpenter told me once, that we no longer had to try to figure out whether the sky was falling or not, because it had fallen long ago, during World World II. But even with the sky at our feet in shards, my concern is how we can best take care of each other. And once I remembered all this, I thought, Hey -- we've survived mad cow disease, we'll survive Linda Tripp.

But at any rate, I'm sorry for any confusion I may have caused.

Now, the second fallacy that I've recently dispelled is that most of your better people -- and here I include myself -- were letting themselves go. Duh -- it turns out that most of them are not going to seed at all, not getting fatter and less efficient. That was the sound of me going down the tubes.

But see, friends of both sexes told me they were gaining all this weight. "I weigh over 600 pounds now," one friend told me over the phone. Another said, "Not one thing I own fits anymore. I'm sitting here naked, wrapped in an old sheet." They also told me that maybe this was OK, because they'd figured out that they were not what they looked like. They were not their stomachs, or thighs. They were not what they had in the world, but what they gave, and who they loved. Right on! I thought.

Five years ago I already knew this was true, but I'd secretly have cut back on fats anyway, or started exercising more. This time I had a friend sew extra material into the waistbands of my jeans. I called them my panel pants. I'd wake up feeling fat, wondering if I'd accidentally put on a pair of the kitty's underwear, and then I'd ask myself, When you're 80 years old, are you going to wish you'd spent more time thinking about how fat your butt is? No. Just the opposite. So I prayed for knowledge of God's will for me, and I got my answer: I went and bought bigger underpants.

I have worn the same size for almost 10 years now, cute little bikinis like maybe Drew Barrymore wears. This time I bought the next size up, the kind that go all the way up to your waist. Boy, one size up is big. How did that happen? You could fit a pumpkin into these. The Gabor sisters could borrow them. I remember a young girl who was helping me fold laundry once, holding up a pair of my underwear and asking with horror, "Do they even make bigger underwear?" And those were the cute small ones.

Where is the woman who used to fit into them? Boy, you got me. I ain't seen her lately. Maybe she's doing her Pilates workout. Maybe she's getting spun.

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Somehow I made peace with this. Then I started running into the people who'd claimed to have gained weight. But they looked exactly the same. Only I was definitely bigger. It was like the episode of "Leave It to Beaver," where all the boys in Beaver's class arrange to make goofy faces for the class photo, and then only Beaver does.

So I'd be standing there in my big girl underwear and panel pants; and next these lying traitor friends would have the gall to ask what I was going to work on next. And for the first time in my life, I could not answer. I have known for more than 40 years what I was going to do. It turns out it's unpatriotic not to know. It's bad for the country. I'm going to be investigated by Kenneth Starr.

It's so nuts. Six months ago, on a Friday, I completely finished up a book I'd been working on for years. Then the following Monday, I set out on a promotional tour to flog the paperback edition of the last book I wrote, crisscrossed the country crying out to small crowds, "Buy my book, buy my book! It will hurt my family if you don't." But the day after I arrived home from that tour, people starting asking, "What will you do next?"

I think I must have signed some form when I was very small where I promised I would always know what I was going to do next, and get to work on that as soon as possible. Because it seemed very upsetting to everyone that I didn't know what I was going to do. I felt like some grown-up was going to sneak up behind me and ask, "Don't you have something to do? Is your homework done? Is your room clean?"

I have always known. It's that simple. I've been busy ever since I was a little kid. I've filled most available emptiness with projects, activities, props. I've dragged in furniture and friends, put up metaphoric curtains. But after I finished promoting my seventh book, and fine-tuning my eighth, I began to believe that it was of no cosmic importance that I write any more books. "Of course it is," people said loyally. But the only reason I could think to do that was for the money. It didn't seem a good enough reason.

Now, I can write a column like this, and they give me money -- more money than you can even imagine -- so it wasn't absolutely imperative that I write any more books. Also, next February, when the new book comes out, it will be my fourth book in six years. Now, there's something wrong with that. I think we can agree on this. That's just too many books. It was probably too many several books ago, but because I'm the sole breadwinner in this family, we could overlook it then. We no longer have that luxury. Too many books becomes gross after a while, show-offy, unseemly, like too many marriages or face lifts. I don't like it in other people.

So here's what I've come up with: Rather than make perfectly good writers crank out new books every few years because they need income and are otherwise unemployable, what if we gave them subsidies NOT to write any more books, like they give to tobacco growers? We'd let the agents thrash out how much each of us will get for not writing.

This would not apply to all writers -- Katha Pollitt would continue to be given writing contracts, as would Taylor Branch, John Kaye, Sharon Olds, a few others. Booksellers would sell the -- shall we say -- shitload of books that already exist. There are plenty of books for everyone from Cynthia Ozick to Dan Quayle to read for at least 15 years. October 2013, we'll all meet back here and reconnoiter. Maybe -- if we're in one of our expansive moods -- issue a few more writing licenses.

After I came up with this plan, my life lurched to a halt. I mean, there's housework, a child, an aging mother who lives down the road, my friends, pets and so on. But I spent more time puttering, looking at things, resting.

It was like limbo as an act of treason.

I put a note in my God-box. I said, "Dude! What do You want me to do?" And as usual, I didn't get an instructional tape from God like in "Mission Impossible." I didn't even get an interesting horoscope or fortune cookie. But someone did drop off a copy of "Turtle Time."

"Turtle Time" is a book for kids by Sandal Stoddard, about a little girl who finds a turtle egg outside and brings it home. In time, a baby turtle hatches. She makes it a house out of a shoe box, and then starts making all sorts of things for the turtle to do, furnishing its house, making it little costumes. But at the end, the kindly turtle tells her, in effect, "I don't need you to make me things, I don't need things to do. I'm on Turtle time."

Then there's a little song the turtle and the girl sing, that you sing to your child as the book comes to an end -- "Turtle time, turtle time ..."

And I thought, What a radical concept, and what a scary way to live. But I started practicing here and there, practiced attention, not leaping up to do something for the sake of having something to do. Maybe I was romanticizing sloth -- I would certainly not put this past me. But I heard a man say once that when he got sober, he had to learn how to do God's work, and to stop trying to do His or Her job. So I let this be my only directive: The sky had fallen 50 years ago, people just needed company, solace, care, a little peace and quiet.

Within a month, I had gained my first five pounds. Also, I became gravely ineffective. For instance, I usually see my mom once a week. We've mostly done errands before, bought groceries, dropped things off that needed to be fixed, the two of us functioning like a well-oiled machine with a poor memory. But when I moved into Turtle time, we started wasting time together. We watched early Wimbledon matches all day. We went to used bookstores and browsed all those perfectly good books we discussed earlier. We ate ice cream. Also, these little English biscuits she likes.

My mother has always been a little fat, and now I am getting fat too. But the trade-off is that I am finding all these crumbs she has to offer. It isn't the feast I have been starved for all my life, the feast I have fantasized about and lusted after, of having a mother who was a queen and a minister and a feminist comic all rolled into one. It turns out that for me and my mother, there's still no big hambone of psychological direction, no petit fours of mirth and encouragement. But there are these delicious crumbs, and when I stop looking around for the banquet table, and instead notice and savor these crumbs, they fill me up. They're the first gifts of Turtle time.

So: I will keep you posted. Meet me back here in two weeks. And as I always said to my hosts when I was a child, and would like to say now to my mother, Salon and to you: Thanks for having me.