Later this month, I'll be 69 and 1/2 years old (yeah, I know; I sound like a four-year-old counting the fractional parts too) and (between us) I never really pictured getting this old, or more accurately stated, I never came close to accurately envisioning what getting this old would look and feel like.
There's a guy in the mirror when I get up every morning who looks absolutely saddened and stunned to see me, especially since he has no idea what to do to help me, though I do appreciate his concern. And when I look at my desk blotter calendar and count the number of doctors' appointments I have in the course of a month, I am as disheartened as the face in the mirror.
Not that I'm exploring in any way the alternative to growing older. Like Dunbar in Catch-22, I'm hanging on to this life with both hands convinced that this is pretty much all there is and am in no hurry to exchange a certainty for an uncertainty, especially when the status of pony rides in both instances is still unsettled.
I grow apprehensive when my wife speaks about getting a new couch, which she recently did, or new curtains for the kitchen or a new anything for anywhere, offering as the reason the current item is 'old.'
As the oldest thing in our house, I get nervous when I don't see the single-cup coffee-maker on the counter or when my favorite cereal bowl comes up missing. I know it's just a matter of time until I encounter them again curbside, realizing that in some shape or form my days are as numbered before ending up there as well, with few to miss or mourn.
Thus I pay attention to articles like this and count it as a small victory that I don't show up in it.
Yet.
-bill kenny
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