I’m Turning Seventy-Five! What?
Yep! It cannot be! Just came back from way over an hour’s run past the town, into the farmers’ fields overlooking the Jura and the Alps. I wasn’t even breathing hard. Must have done at least eight, nine kilometers, that is over five miles. Yeah, that’s not fast but then, I’ve never been a fast runner. A good jogger? Yes! Have done it since I was nineteen. Wow! Over fifty-five years? Half a century? Oooh!
Do the yoga type exercises I started when I was twenty-four and still the same number, even though I remember they decreased them with age. Stand on my shoulders, do a molehill daisy and more.
Well, I do see the changes when I stand in front of the mirror. The face is not ‘my face’, the neck really needs some work. Well, maybe I just don’t want to accept what I am? Don’t dare wear shorts, even show anything above my knees and certainly don’t want to show the top of my arms.
As I ran this the last month, surrounded by incredible nature, I first smiled when men walking their dogs, running them, or running alone would greet me with “Bonjour, Madame!” but later it started irking me. Was it so obvious that I was old? One day, however, a very handsome middle-aged man, not more than fifty, gave me a look that made my day.
Guess I will have to just put up with it! Of course, I also use it saying things like, “Will you forgive me, at my age it is hard to see, and I forgot my glasses!” That’s when I hand a cashier change that I just can’t make out. Young people are really good about it back home in the States and in Switzerland and France. Because I haven’t been in any other countries since twenty-fifteen, I can’t say anything about the rest of the world.
Hey, I used the word ‘young people’! Yes, I love them, the ones that are in their twenties and early thirties. It gets harder with those over forty. If I can, I help the young and love to listen to them. They are fun! Isn’t that my ‘grandmotherly’ side? Ouhh! Guess so! I don’t have any kids or grandkids, but, of course, I do — the young ones I’ve really come to care about and who care about me.
Hey, I just remembered something! Years ago, in the nineteen-nineties when I was in on vacation in Seguret (that is in France) with my Pierre, a doctor, who had been a French medical examiner during the war with Algeria (that actually really dates me!) guessed that I was thirty-nine. I was forty-eight at the time. He put Pierre’s age at fifty-eight. Guess what? Pierre was born the same year as I.
And what did he add? He said that we all age and die but, depending on many factors, we can in fact be up to twenty percent younger than our chronological age or twenty percent older.
Pierre’s own doctor told him later that same year that he should be careful, that his stomach was that of a seventy-year-old. My poor Pierre passed away from an aneurism two years later.
Guess what? I’m not turning seventy-five! Twenty percent of seventy-five is fifteen. I’m turning sixty!
