Aging

Tuesday, June 21, 1983

The first day of summer, my 63rd.  No one is more astounded than I am to realize that I have seen that many summers.  Perhaps I am unrealistic to expect my body to perform better - to be so frustrated by my pains.  These muscles and sinew have served me well for long past half a century; but my grandmothers moved more easily than I when they were past eighty!  The only thing that slowed them down was losing their sight.

My grandma's words from 35 years ago.  I was 10 years old at the time.  She would have been about nine years younger than my mom (her daughter) is right now.  She and my grandpa and my immediate family spent a week at a resort together that summer.  My family hadn't yet moved to where my parents live now.  I was experiencing the decade of the best music ever created.

Her words "expect my body to perform better" strike me as kind of funny.  She talks as if she's a decathlete in the twilight of her career or something.  And little did she know she was going to live nearly 35 more years!  I wonder if she reread that sometime in her late 80s or early 90s, when the real aches and pains were setting in....the ones her grandmas surely had even if they weren't noticed by her.

To add another stat to my first paragraph of analytics, I'm 18 years away from 63.  If I live long enough to see my 63rd summer solstice I wonder what kinds of pains I'll be blogging about?  I already have a few that don't seem to disappear - will they be worse?  My daughters will all be grown and (hopefully) out of college and (hopefully) living on their own and (hopefully) sending portions of their monthly incomes to dear OLD dad as reimbursement for all his wisdom over the years.  I'll still be about 20 years away from retirement.  I might even be a grandpa.  Ugh, where's the delete key.....

I remember my grandparents from when I was 10.....they were old!  Holy cow, I just thought of something - grandma's oldest son is nearly as old as she was in 1983.  I look at him, and think back to my grandpa through my ten-year-old eyes....and grandpa seemed way older!  So what has happened in 35 years to make the 60s of now seem so much younger than the 60s of then?  Has aging slowed down?  Has a lifetime of comfort (my grandparents were the Greatest Generation, surviving The Depression and WWII to produce the Baby Boomers) added years to our youth, delaying the onset of "old age"?  Or as we ourselves age does it become that much harder to see old age in others?  I have no answers....maybe there are no answers.

In a recent conversation with an acquaintance the process of aging was compared to a roll of toilet paper.  Don't worry, it's clean TP.  Anyway, when the roll is new and full it doesn't seem to disappear very fast when unrolled.  But the smaller the roll gets, the faster it vanishes, especially when you get past the halfway point.  Life works the same, does it not?  When we're kids the days and weeks and years seem.....to take...........forever.  But now the years fly by, seemingly at the same rate as months used to.  We hear it all the time - "I don't know where last week went!" or "Before I knew it March was gone!".  Being on the last half of the roll myself, I know that the time between now and 63 will be gone far faster than the 18 years from 27 until now.  That's humbling.  And frightening.

Live long and prosper, everyone, while you've still got squares on your roll.