old age

Things Learned While Aging

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Young people walk fast. I’ve looked all over Amazon but can’t find any rear-view glasses or personal turn signals to help stay out of their way. If you are in a hurry and someone old is holding you back from getting to your gym workout, there’s no way the person in front knows about the person in back, at least not yet*. As a young person, old people were often in my way or holding me up, making a 5-minute errand take 10 minutes. If I could go back in time…

Most people don’t have a sense of walking traffic patterns. It was more obvious when I was disabled but fellow pedestrians still walk directly at me, cut in front of me, and frequently simply stop in front of me. It’s not clear how much of that is caused by the subject of the preceding paragraph, but this might help readers: stay to the right, pass on the left, and don’t assume you’re the only person walking. The rear-view glasses might help, too, but old people’s brakes aren’t what they used to be, even when the old person can see you**, so think before you suddenly stop walking to do whatever it is you do when you suddenly stop walking. And if you’re walking right at me… why???

Change isn’t just a fact of life, it is personal. Newspapers were a great start to the day for over 50 years. Spread them out, let the open pages catch the toast crumbs, and scan the headlines for interesting news. Turn the page and start over. Spill your tea or coffee? Let the paper automatically clean up the mess. Then use the remainder for bird-cage lining, or package-protecting, or fly-swatting. And what has changed? Try to clip an article from your online “news aggregator” and place it in a scrapbook of your grandchild’s accomplishments. Or swat a fly. No one else has complained about this so it is assumed the demise of The Paper was directed at me. And so many old movies, too, where the father snaps open the morning paper for his coffee and enlightenment…why are these movies in MY streaming services?

Confirmation Bias is a real thing. Oxford Dictionary: “the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one’s existing beliefs. Confirmation Bias sets in and we downgrade any suggestion our views are inaccurate.” As a lifetime contrarian and Devil’s Advocate***, old age has revealed the depths and efforts of existing beliefs to maintain their hold over the public. As a young man the point was to prick and irritate, especially established educational and political systems. Old age has made the process more focused, and getting others to see they may be wrong and others may be right has become an adventure. Gently chiding liberals, however, isn’t really productive. They are so polite they tend to absorb the message and you never know if they get the point or not. Conservatives have developed over time to be less inclined for spirited debate but super eager to label and name-call****. In the past they used to be great debaters and often friends, back in the day when they didn’t feel victimized and shunned.  Consequently, straddling the fence has become painful on the crotch area instead of invigorating to the head area. Important question: can Confirmation Bias become part of a belief system that doesn’t really believe in anything?

Modern product packaging is being designed by younger and younger people. Babies, even. My most recent trial is cooking instructions for pre-cooked breakfast sausage. First, they include every known method of preparation for eating except for an air fryer, which is my choice for cooking anything. The instructions for all those other devices are written in Spanish as well as English, which puts so much writing on the package it needs to be small. You know what that means. And they use red lettering on a black background. Modern packaging has forced me to carry not only reading glasses, but a magnifying glass, as well. And find a bright light source.

One last small one: because our metabolism slows as we age, tracking food intake is a good idea. So when I eat three small pork sausages, the nutrition label states: “70 calories per 28 grams.” If you understand the problem, you are at least halfway to being an old person.

The rest of you will find out later. If you’re lucky.

*Inventors? Please?

**We’re usually looking down, for obvious reasons.

***Ai it.

****Demoncrat. Libtard. Libs have almost caught up in the name calling, though.

Peckish or Puckish? The Senior Single Can Be Both

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Living alone? It’s not a bad thing. You come and go whenever you want. Eat whenever you want. Clean (or not) whenever you want. You control the temperature of your home. And imagine the video/music/tv viewing freedom!

So what could go wrong? Old Age.

All those freedoms are fantastic for mobile, alert, supple people, with great vision. Young people. When you’re an older person, these are the pertinent freedoms:

  1. You can dig out your own slivers, wherever they are. If you can reach…or find the tweezers…or see the sliver…
  2. Same with toenail clippings. Woo hoo! Chiropractor, anyone?
  3. You get to answer the door even if you are mid-stream your third morning urination.
  4. You wash the dishes. All of them. Yourself. You can still do them anytime you want, though. And you have the freedom to make as many dirty as you want!
  5. You get to remember the last time you vacuumed. Doing it the same day every week helps if you can remember to write the day down someplace easy to find. Dirt is not as easy to see, these days.
  6. Same with laundry. The less active older person needs laundry less, so it’s a little easier to forget, but if you’re looking for your glasses when they’re on your head…
  7. You can rest on the floor whenever you want. If a senior falls in an empty apartment, does he make a sound? If only we made a special sound. But the lonely senior better have a warning system with younger people in the loop.
  8. You get to quietly fume when the toilet roll runs out and the new rolls are in the front hall closet. Bonus: you get to be the one who put them there.
  9. Lonely? What senior living alone is lonely? Who needs the touch of another human being? Not me, I prefer being able to drink right out of the juice container.

That’s enough. Living at both ends of the spectrum of life and negotiating each stage of existence from one end to the other is challenging, but what else is there? It’s not fair when that understanding only comes with the wisdom of age.

Unfair, but true.

September is not National Be Kind to A Senior Month. There is no such month. There is a Senior Citizens Month, established in May 1963, by John F. Kennedy.* If you’re young and didn’t know, hope it makes you feel better I didn’t know either.

Can’t wait for May 2026!

Hope I make it…

*Please. Google it

PS For no good reason: “What the Puck?”

More About Big Beautiful Things

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It was a master stroke of BS to call a crap-bag of laws a big, beautiful thing (BBT) so it got me thinking of other BBTs, not to be confused with BLTs. The list is subjective, biased, and often fictional so if you have a complaint, stuff it in your big, beautiful arse.

And there is the first BBT: Irish/Welsh/Scottish movie dialogue. Not having been to any of those areas, I can’t confirm they talk the same in their natural settings as they do in movies, but they have a wonderfully melodic way of ambling around a thought, not expressing it directly, and yet putting more meaning into it than a shorter, succinct sentence. The Gift of The Blarney Stone? Google it. I dare you, you fecking shite. And watch The Snatch, a 2000 Brad Pitt movie with the most enjoyable, unintelligible English dialogue ever. BBT! Ooh, closed captioning, another BBT!

Shopping on a budget? You should be. Several stores in my area say they want my business but only one meets my budgetary, hours of operation, and proximity requirements. No, I won’t say who it is. I visited one of the stores on my “too high a price list” the other day, however, and was pleasantly surprised, twice. First, they had a yellow tag on muffins in the bread aisle. That usually means “BOGO”, or Buy one Get One free. BBT! Without putting on my glasses I grabbed two packages and headed for the self-checkout. Sadly, even with my glasses and 9-digit membership/phone number the machine still tried to charge for two, instead of one. It is an age-old grocery trick: leave the yellow tags on AFTER the sales end and see what happens at check-out. Some people pay the regular price rather than make a scene. As the steam rose in my brain a sweet, older lady approached to see if I was about to faint. Before I could sputter my anger, she said this: “Oh, honey. Those are buy one get TWO free. You need to ring up three and the price of two will be credited.”: What? WHAT!!!? She did it manually while I ran for a third package. When I returned, wow, another BBT!

As a senior, enough small things go wrong on a daily basis so when things go right, we are surprised into thinking they are BBTs. They’re not but here are a few examples of lesser, aspirational BBTs nonetheless. After the second hip surgery last month a walker became my constant companion for several weeks, along with an accessory I call “Reacher”. For the last two weeks I’ve dropped things on purpose just to enjoy the use of Reacher. My name is Robert and I am an addict.

Senior eyesight seems to get better and then get worse and then get better and then get worse…but it always gets better the day of my AMD shots**. It’s a BBT to see me ace those eye charts as a 73-year-old. Maybe one of the nurses will be impressed and ask me out…

My old (both old and former) girlfriend has reached “perfunctory response status” in regard to my texts and updates. Perfunctoriness (sic) leads to humorous responses. My text said some medical tests were positive but one was bad and needs more testing. Her response was “Good news!” BBT? I’ll accept the judge’s ruling.

Recent conversations have been about how many voices there are in our heads. It’s a BBT thing because I know, now, mine is not the only skull inhabited by more than just a Big Beautiful Brain. Or is it Ai speaking?  And how could I forget Thurber’s character, Walter Mitty? Or the movie “Inside Out”? Crap. I need to remember remembering is the first thing to go.

And then there is the Air Fryer. A YUGE*** BBT. As a man who loves to cook and hates to clean, my $24 Air Fryer from Walmart has raised the gastronomic level of life. Men living alone, pay attention: grilled cheese, day old chicken, two day old pizza, left-over hamburgers and hot dogs from July 4th, toast, and more, all done to perfection with minimal clean up, no butter, no saggy microwave structure, a wonderfully crisp, like new

I went away for a few moments. Don’t ask, just go get an Air Fryer.

** Do not google this procedure if you have a weak stomach. It happens to people like me every three months.

*** Thanks, Donald, for the new word. BBT!

Benign Bemusements

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After years of complaining about drivers’ inability to understand and use a well-known and researched free life-saving safety device, blinkers, it is time for empathy, time to walk a mile in their shoes. This past Monday, the 13-mile, mainly four-lane highway drive from my home to the Fitness Center at Turning Stone was the time and place. I intended to drive the entire route without ever touching the turn signal arm. It is a drive of very few turns so…and it was performed at 4:30 AM so there were few witnesses…and victims…but…

The first 12 miles were glorious: the sheer audacity and freedom was intoxicating. I changed lanes on a whim. I made my one right turn onto the highway with total abandon and when the two lanes narrowed to one, I shifted over with a youthful, carefree exuberance. That joy filled my soul and I lost myself in it until in anticipation of a left turn into the parking garage, my now-unattended brain fired the nerve(s?) of my left arm. The left hand fell off the steering wheel, my eyes dropped to watch, and the left-hand fingers descended perfectly onto the turn signal lever. Could I catch myself in time to prevent disaster or was I doomed to repeat the past? Would the turn signal lever be strong enough to resist? Would it count if the light bulb was burned out and never flashed? Is Trump ruining the entire world?

I’ll try, again, on the way home.

Speaking of Trump, is it strange he decimates social, educational, medical, and scientific services in the name of “balancing the budget” and then spends billions on immigration deportations, domestic military policing, and parades? The American Public is (are?) the idiot(s) for allowing this to happen, and by electing him in the first place. Will we do anything about it?

Immigration reform is needed, but if we assume 1 in a 10,000 Americans is a criminal, it’s safe to assume 1 in 10,000 immigrants is a criminal, right? So we are deporting them all? Indiscriminately? Court cases alone will cost billions. It is a classic case of mismanagement made sadder by the hurt it is causing innocents. And is a perfect example of baby and bathwater. It is proof we need experienced professionals running our government who understand nuance or at least are willing to learn. HHS Chief RFK firing all 17 members of an advisory board to the CDC? He don’t need no stinkin’ advice.

Political doublespeak and the attendant physical contortions are not unique to the Republican Party, or to this day and age. Democrats are participants, too, as well as being quick learners. But I just watched Republican Representative Loeren Boebert in a US House hearing perfectly detail the causes, actions, and repercussions involved in an “insurrection”. Finally, I said to myself, someone on the Republican side sees it. Finally. But she was talking about Los Angeles. Find it on you tube and watch. It is the perfect example of political…umm…selective memory? Ignorance? Oblivion? She was innocently outraged, positive about all facts, and sure anyone who didn’t agree with her was stupid, unpatriotic, and un-American. Plus, she was shrill, one of her unique skills.  Unfortunately, I cannot remember a Democrat display so completely tone-deaf and absurd, but there probably is one, someplace. It is what politicians do and we reward them for it. Let’s vote them all out next time. All new for the future.

There are so many odd, sad, funny thoughts and things happening to us old people. This post was supposed to be about those things. But Ai is ruining everything, including my brain. Politics is an ear worm, now. Anyone know a cure? Maybe if politicians stopped being stupid and self-serving…?

See? Funny things.

Death as an Equation

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Several past posts have been about The D Word, but this post will be more objective, less emotional, almost dry, in discussing the impact of Death.

In youth, there was lots of death (sic). Pets died, farm animals died, insects got squashed, and fish got caught…and eaten. Very few of those deaths were looked at as Death (sic). Insects don’t deserve to live, anyway, and pets, well, pets came and went. Many dogs and cats wandered off the farm never to be seen again. Often, we’d find bones in the farm fields but never made any connection. At least the adults said there wasn’t any. The only emotional loss on the farm was when we shipped a favorite calf or piglet to the slaughterhouse, and as young’uns we didn’t actually knew what it meant at the time.

The facts of life don’t take long to be revealed, however, and around the eighth grade an emotion surfaced in talking about Death. What happened to Uncle Carl was defined as “passing”, per mom. It was her brother and a favorite uncle. He smoked cigarettes from packs rolled up in his tee shirt sleeves, drank, used hair product, and liked to lean on the hood of his convertible. In the 1950s and 60. He visited the farm regularly and called me “Sport”. When he stopped coming, it was weeks before I asked mom. She set me and my brother on the couch and announced “Carl won’t be coming anymore”, and as we kids pondered what we did wrong she added, “He has passed on.”

Death made itself known eventually, and we had some disagreements, but I came to understand and accepted it which was easy since my death was so far away. An early and now long-gone girlfriend said I was a great comfort at funerals. As a big, strong, quiet man woman liked to cry on me, no matter their age.

Now, an approaching Death needs to be an arbitrary factor in equations and discussions about End of Life. Input all known variables and solve for X. The word death meant nothing to the young mind and now means nothing to the old mind. In fact, Death, now, is simply the next event, the next inevitable stage of Life. Some of those were turning 13, turning 16, kissing a girl (thanks Cousin Debbie), buying beer, college, marriage, kids, marriage again, marriage again (Yes, sadly, not a typo), grandkids, and retirement. These were most of the major events looked forward to and anticipated. The first beer, by the way, was so bad, how could anyone drink it?

But beer might help with Death, if you think about it. I love beer, now, so maybe, after death…?

Naw. The equation aspect of death is a result of living. When someone near my age dies, and when someone older than me dies, there are two different equations: How much longer than the former have I lived, and do I have as much time left, as the latter. I’ve mentioned before, the age of Death and how it had to be determined for End of Life Financial Planning. Mine is 84, the age mom died. Dad died at 51, so…

The Death Equation became harder to solve when The Calamities hit. They skewed the values of certain parts of the formula, at one point even suggested a final solution, variables be damned. In sharing my experiences with friends/cohorts in my age group, it seems we all suffer something, eventually, and don’t know what to do about it. Sharing experiences has a warning implied, and several cohorts have learned of a new calamity thanks to the exposing of someone else’s old one. I learned about my new calamity, one I never would have suspected, from the reported trials of a friend in Florida.

Another friend has a better description of the equation: we are all old cars. Any car lover worth his clicking torque wrench knows there comes a time when it doesn’t make any sense to repair an old car. You fix one thing, and something else fails. Just let it go.

A recent afternoon text back and forth with a friend whose PSA is over 4 was about the worst calamity to get in old age. My choice: Cognitive Impairment (CI). Cancer, Arthritis, AMD, none seem as bad as CI. But later, as I thought about all this, I asked myself: what if I had Ci, would I not have Death to think about?

No one knows. Or at least has ever mentioned anything.

Maybe I’ll look up that Psychic I dated in the 70s…as long as she doesn’t mention marriage, again…