“Aah, The Rigors of Getting Older”

Life is predictable, everyone gets older, whether we like it or not. Some of us age gracefully, some of us try to postpone the ravages of aging by getting a nip and a tuck, here and there or everywhere.

So, what are some of the general signs of getting older. One obvious one is the simple act of getting up and out of a chair or a couch. During our younger years we jumped up and out in an instant, but now we have to get help by maneuvering back and forth or by getting a helping hand and a helpful pull up. It’s embarrassing how “unagile” we’ve become.

Many of us, when we reached forty, had difficulty reading the newspaper or a restaurant menu, but had no problem seeing a good looking guy or gal some 50 yards away and could see what they were or were not wearing, and whether it matched or not. From that time on, we invested in reading glasses, not just one pair, but several, to be available at an instant’s notice, in time of need, which now seems to be all the time.

Another vexation of getting older is those sneaky aches and pains that pop up at unexpected times without any reasonable expectation of figuring out why, where, or what you did to deserve this ache and pain. The term “ pain in the neck” can be taken more literally as we get older rather than the other definition of being an obnoxious person.

Since we older folk are encouraged to exercise by our doctors, our family, and our friends, little mention is made about the exercise gained by walking to the bathroom, to empty our bladders, sometimes 3 times or more per night, much to our dismay, chagrin and annoyance, and about our disrupted sleep, right in the middle of a dream about Clark Gable or Marilyn Monroe, as luck would have it. Talk about walking zombies? Boris Karloff had nothing on us.

Our friends, as we age, get fewer and fewer and they eventually disappear all together, depending on how long we live. When reading a newspaper when we were younger, we either turned to the fashion section or the sports section, but now, as we age, we go right to the obituary section. By the way, did you notice that everybody who died, died alphabetically according to the newspaper? If our name isn’t there, we move on to another section, with a big sigh of relief.

Talking about health, or lack of it, did you notice that when we meet a friend or someone new, the talk inevitably centers on the status of your health or their health. It’s something like giving or getting an “ organ recital”, my heart, my liver, my kidney’s etc., etc. Instead of names, we could refer to each other by our blood pressure figures, “ Hi, 135 over 70 or “Hi, 125 over 75”. This would save us a lot of small, meaningless talk and get right down to the nitty-gritty.

In conclusion, another one of the rigors of getting older is the slow progression of finding out that the foods we once gulped down with no problem, and with gusto when we were younger, which now cause us all kinds of trouble, especially in the area of creating that social pollutant called - methane gas. One positive result is that it does cause us to smile more often in order to camouflage our indiscretion to others who unfortunately happened to be near us at the time. What kind of an “eating” grin do they call that?

So, keep on smiling and grow old gracefully, and never look back, something might be gaining on you.

Conservative commentary by Chuck Lehmann