Nearing Age 70: Some Thoughts

I have a birthday coming up in a couple of weeks. I'm going to be 70 years old. You think more about the age you've reached when it's one of these round-number milestones.

It doesn't seem possible. Can there be some mistake? To convince myself, I had to do the mental math, subtracting the year I was born from the current year. Yup, 70. No mistake.

I don't feel any different than when I was 20. But everybody says that. There's something that never changes, your inner feeling of self, maybe. Hard to explain.

And you want to say, How did I get to be this age? Well, of course, the seconds and the minutes tick away and become hours, days, weeks, months, years. Tick, tick, we're all getting there. It's just that when you're young you can't visualize yourself as old. Once, when I was young—I'm only sure it was younger than age 12—I wondered if I would live to see the year 2000. You never realize you are going to be old until one day you are. And maybe not even then.

An uncle of mine once said, Life is a cruel joke, you just get old and have aches and pains. My sister, eternally an optimist—you know, one of those "the-glass-is-half-full" types--had no sympathy or understanding for how our uncle could say that. I understand it, even though I am not (yet) too seriously wracked by aches and pains. (I could be either more or less healthy than I am, although illness is not the sole province of the older.) I think that a reflective person can't help but say, What's it all about? I have to add that I have some notion of the fact that some people's religious faith gives them comfort in the form of an answer to some of these questions about "the meaning of life"—but it's been a question for many of the more thoughtful persons since Mankind began.

Some people say there's a good side to getting older. Maybe even beyond being able to retire and so not have to get up in the morning, get dressed, and go out into the cold to get to work; and becoming eligible for Medicare, which is wonderful because it goes a long way toward paying your medical bills.

They say that you get more content, more comfortable with who you are, more comfortable in your skin, so to speak. Yes, I think it's true. It's probably very different from a lot of the angst that we all go through when we're teen-agers.

There's the matter of regrets. There's probably no one who does not have at least some little regret about something done or not done in the past of their life. And, again if you're an introspective type, you might spend some thought on thinking about what might have happened, where you might be now, if you had done that rather than this.

Of course they say that it's not good to have regrets nor to think about what might have been: they're not productive thoughts. That may be true: you only upset yourself, wishing you could go back to some earlier time and do it differently.

But for every choice you might have made differently, you would have made yourself a different person. If you're content with who and what you are, you might not like one of those alternative paths your life would have taken, just because you'd be someone else now.

Copyright © 2012 by Richard Stein

Is It True, or Just a Joke?

Unless you've been living in a cave or on top of the Himalayas, you know that "erectile dysfunction" has become a household word. This is because of the development--and incessant promotion--of drugs to treat this condition.

No word on what effect that has had on the birth rate.

Anyway, I ordered one of those drugs, Cialis, over the Internet. What I got was a huge poster of a naked woman. It said "This is Alice." The idea was, you see Alice, you get an erection.

That was just a joke, folks.

On another subject: I'm turning into some kind of monster, hybrid bird. I've got crow's feet and turkey neck.

That one may be funny, but it's not a joke.

My car isn't a V-8 or V-6. It's a VD. That's "very decrepit."

Copyright (c) 2010 by Richard Stein

Old and Nutty*

If you're a bit nutty, you hear voices.

If you're old, you don't hear clearly.

If you're old and nutty, you hear voices but you don't know what they're saying.
_____

*Okay, not a "PC" term.

Copyright (c) 2010 by Richard Stein

Some Random Thoughts

Maybe you've heard that Continental Airlines and United are going to merge. They're going to call the new company Con-U.

Why is it that tornadoes always seem to hit Goobersville? My theory is that tornadoes just love to eat trailer parks. I guess they're tasty.

When I hear a noise, often I can't tell right away if it's me wheezing or an outside noise (ah, the joys of getting old).

Copyright (c) 2010 by Richard Stein

50 Years After High School

For me, it's fifty years since high school. My graduating class is having a fifty-year reunion this summer. I probably won't go. I've never gone to a high-school reunion (I won't go into the reasons now), but the class has a web site, and there are photos posted of luncheon gatherings the class has held the last two summers.

Those fat, old, gray-haired people can't possibly be the same people as the slim, young people I knew in high school. I can only identify them by the captions to the pictures; I'd never know a single one. Some of them look better than others. There's the quarterback of the football team: he looks like he's in good shape and stands very erect. But so many are overweight. Two are in nursing homes (no, they're not in the photos), others use canes or oxygen bottles. A number—too many—sadly have passed away.

I am sure that I don't look like they do. Somehow—good genes, clean living (okay, stop laughing!)—I escaped thirty years of aging.

Now, if you believe that. . . .

Copyright © 2009 by Richard Stein

The Seasons

In the summer I do my sad little version of "gardening," that is, tending flowers in containers on my second-story porch. Still, I do enjoy making things grow, and there's the reward of having the pretty flowers, too.

And there's walking (I like to take little hikes in a nearby wildlife refuge, although I don't do as much of this as I used to, due to joint pain), reading out on my porch, and cooking and eating out there, too. (Makes me wonder how I pass my time in the winter. Now don't start envisioning someone sitting by the fire knitting—I may have a fire, but I don't knit.) Also, here in Chicago—unlike some places where you could do all the year 'round those things that we do in summer--we appreciate our nice weather all the more once it comes.

Certainly we make adjustments to our lives according to the seasons. There are lots of "outdoor activities" that are associated with summer. There are outdoor winter activities, too--skiing, snowmobiling, ice skating--but I never was into any of those. There was a time, many years ago—either when I was trying to write a PhD thesis or a period of unemployment—when I spent a time outdoors pretty much daily, all through the winter: hiking around with my camera, clambering up on the ice dunes that form on the beach, taking pictures. It seems as though you can develop a certain adaptation or tolerance to the cold weather, and I have never again, since that winter, had that kind of acclimatization. Nowadays I don't have to experience winter's cold very much simply because I don't do the walking, don't spend much time outdoors, don't go anywhere except in my car. (Once in a while I shovel a little snow, but that's mostly performed for me.) Not that that's entirely a good thing, but it does lessen the degree to which I want to leave our cold climate behind.

Also, I am perhaps not quite yet in that age regime, but there comes an age when your balance is not as good so that there's the danger of slipping and falling on ice. Old folks who fall might sustain fractures. Not a cheery thought, but the point is that if I don't do all the wintertime tramping around outdoors that I once did, I'm not as much at risk for that sort of thing.

Anyway, it's summer. Time to put all that out of mind and enjoy all the advantages of this time of year.
Copyright © 2009 by Richard Stein