Hello from the Wrinkled Teenager or the Choices of Age
Yes, it’s me again, almost a year after the first piece where I used my mother’s description of the peculiar state of those of us who have few responsibilities but benefit from generally good health even in our ‘advanced’ stage of life. I am now seventy-five (75).
However, even we note the passing of time. I remember being tired as a teenager, probably from all the changes my body was going through. So, however, are ours, in a different direction, perhaps more slowly because we now know so much more about how to decelerate some of them, be we, you and I, still face them.
So, you’re tired and don’t want to do a thing. Well, maybe you’ll lie down on the sofa and watch something on some streaming service. Then, you remember that you have a dinner to go to in the evening. You’d rather not. You just want to get something from the fridge and continue with the program. But this is important, you remind yourself. Important to whom? You’re not about to get promoted anymore. You’re on your way out. Retirement is looming or you’re already out of the everyday working routine.
After about fifteen minutes of looking at the screen and not really seeing or hearing anything that has been going on, you pick up your cellphone, get to the right contact and touch that little old fashioned image of the receiver of a phone which is either in some landfill or long disposed of with parts having been recycled for whatever needs some metal and wait for one on the other side of the electronic waves to answer. When they do, you provide a little lie, “I’m not feeling well, really can’t make it.”
However, are you really lying or are you simply covering yourself, refusing to realize and admit that your body and mind are not what they were five, ten, fifteen, twenty years ago? After all, somehow you felt a burst when an old friend came to town, one you really wanted to see. You had gone through your clothes to make sure you would impress the one who had made you laugh so much when you were in school together and who had gone on to be a successful business person.
Well, it’s happened to me. When there is little left in the refrigerator, and a craving for shrimp has me daydreaming of the fragrance of those curly bits in a flavorful sauce, I invariably get up and drive to get a two pound frozen package of the giant variety of my favorite seafood. Then, I come back and cook it. Hey, I have enough energy to hand mince the garlic, the lemongrass, the ginger, the thyme… What am I saying? I love to cook. So, I have the energy to do that? Seems so, just like most days I have the will and energy to run. Not today. But I did yesterday and the day before, doing at least four miles each time.
You see that’s the secret. I have less energy than I did, and my mind plays tricks with me so that I use it for the things I really love to do. It hit me yesterday when one of my best friends and I attended an event together. That best friend is also facing the same challenge with the same result.
That made me think. Ha, yes, with the computer on what should be a coffee table but has become a real desk and a sofa with pillows and a down cover so that putting in words while sipping great coffee (I do carefully find the kind of grains I like and have my little grinder get them down to powder) can almost instantaneously be followed by a few moments of relaxation, I have come to the conclusion that we, ‘elders’ (don’t like that but it is true), do need to spend some time deciding what we really like and want to do.
What we come up with may be very different from what we did like and want to do years before or it may be rather similar. It is just that like teenagers (love that — we are, as my now deceased mother pointed out when she turned seventy, wrinkled teenagers) we have to decide what is important for us and do as much as we can to follow through with it.
So, today, I write (love that as much as I did when I was ten), will go to the store (get some body lotion as I have none left and still want my skin to be, well, nice for me), heat my lunch (always prepare four times the quantity I need and freeze so as to have variety), and go for a little shopping with a great friend who is a dozen years older. Tonight, I will do some yoga instead of going to a fish fry. I ate last night at a very interesting evening with my friend but today will go back to my routine…nothing past six in the evening and, even then before that magic hour, just a piece of fruit or a really small piece of bread with some great, what you might call ‘stinky’, cheese!!
