AGE

On Getting Older


Lately, three things have come to my attention about the issue of getting older.

One:

There was a list going around on the internet on the topic of the advantages of getting older. One was that no one would accuse us of being hypochondriacs. not.funny. (Well, it sort of is, but you know what I mean.)

Two:

I listened to a man on NPR (being old and all, I can’t remember if he was a doctor or a researcher) who said that we shouldn’t call getting older aging; we should call it-----Deterioration. Not nice. Not nice at all.

And Three:

I think of myself as ME! Just plain ME. Yes, I know I’m older than I used to be. But when someone speaking about a group of people she had encountered at an event said to me: They were about your age, I thought, Wait, WHAT?

I thought I was just me, a bit older than I used to be yes, but just me. I hadn’t realized that OTHER people knew this. I thought they just thought of me as ME. Not OLD me.

My cover is blown? Or I had no cover to begin with….I was just fooling myself?

Maybe I will go for this look.

I think she's having fun.

Adding Injury to Insult

A friend of mine says, any time that I complain about getting older, “Getting old is not all it’s cracked up to be.” Not that I’m old. I’m older-ish. But honestly, if you thought life was fair, wait till you’re older-ish. Things go wrong and it’s just not fair.

Your hair goes gray or white, unless you pay big bucks to return it to its original color. Your teeth are yellowish, unless you pay big bucks to whiten them. You haven’t any idea what to wear, since in your mind, you’re still in your thirties, but when you go to the Gap, Ann Taylor or J. Crew, everything is size 0 or 2, and you get the idea they REALLY don’t want you in there. (Order from the internet, please, where no-one sees you. You’re not our desired demographic.) So you decide you should shop at Talbots and Chicos, but your younger daughter says “Please don’t go there.” And once, when she was with you and all you did was walk toward the table that had holiday-themed sweaters on them, she said loudly, “Step away from the sweaters.” I wasn’t going to buy one; they were just in the path of what I was going to look at. Honest. I’m not that far gone yet.

Your older daughter, referring to some “older” people in the audience for a reading by David Sedaris, says that she worried that they would be offended, since they were “older” and all. I told her that they were just young people in older bodies. Sigh…

You have physical things go wrong, things that should only happen to OLD people, not to you. I have had inflammation of the bursa sacs in my shoulders and in my right knee. When I whined to my older daughter about it, she said, “Oh, bursitis.” No. Bursitis is what old people get. I have inflammation in the bursa sacs.

Since we’ve moved to Georgia, I’ve had surgery for plantar fasciitis (caused perhaps by too much tennis, not by aging! I played tennis three to five times a week for almost the whole eleven years I lived in Florida.) I’ve had surgery to remove a non-cancerous (thank goodness) thyroid. And I’ve had sinus surgery.

But now the worst insult of all! I have a knitting-related injury that may require surgery(according to the surgeon--big surprise). It’s just NOT FAIR. It’s knitting, not skiing, not running, not sky-diving or any kind of diving. KNITTING!!! I have apparently wrecked the joint at the base of my thumb and will eventually need (I am putting this off through the time-honored tactic of denial) surgery, to scrape out all the bad stuff and put in some substance to replace the damaged bone. Ick. And it requires recovery time and physical therapy and NO KNITTING for some period of time. So I knit conservatively, take ibuprofen, and ignore the problem. We’ll see how long this all works.

But for DOG’s sake, a knitting injury?!?