See Spot. Run.

A scare this morning.

I stumble into the bathroom this morning at about 6:00 a.m., without my reading glasses. Now I've reached the point in my middle-aged presbyopia that it's not just restaurant menus that are out of focus -- I live in a sphere of blurriness with a radius of about six feet. Even so, I still recoil from the fuzzy reflection of myself in just my shorts. These days, anything less revealing than a diving suit is pretty repulsive.

But hang on, what's that large, circular black spot to the left of my navel?

See, another sign of advancing age is the number of seborrheic keratoses that speckle my torso: brown mole-like patches that are completely harmless but result in calls to the fire department whenever I go swimming to inquire if they've lost a dalmatian.

However, this is not a keratosis. Too dark, too regular in shape. Time to panic?

I poke gingerly at the spot. It falls off with a metallic clank on the bathroom floor.

Somehow, I got a penny stuck on my skin during the night.

Relieved, I tell the tale to Secundus, who's unimpressed, but still manages to pocket the penny on the way out.