|
|
|
Getting Up There
 In
a departure from my usual practice, this column
contains adult material. As a rule, that expression means stuff chiefly of
interest to adolescent males. In this case, it really refers to
adults.  It
may not be suitable for readers under the age of 50.
The late Meg
Greenfield of the Washington Post once wrote a hilarious
essay on aging. She noted that when she turned 50, younger people would try
to console her by saying, “Oh, that’s not old!” Her
comment: “It is death to hear.”
Amen. Having
turned 60 this year, I get the same “consolation” all the time. I
know what Meg meant. The harder people try to deny that you’re old,
the older you feel. It’s about as reassuring as someone volunteering,
“I hardly noticed your goiter!”
In his charming
autobiography, Bob Dylan comments that he never really understood the
generation he was supposed to be the voice of. I never understood it either,
and I’m glad to know he felt the same way. But now that we Baby
Boomers are getting up there, we need spokesmen less modest than Bob,
who is still singing love songs. We need grouchy old guys such as myself.
Getting old is
like adolescence in reverse. Your body keeps giving you surprises again, but
they’re not as much fun this time. Organs you used to take for
granted cease to function quite as well, causing you inconvenience,
discomfort, and embarrassment. Nobody has ever prepared you for all the
things aging entails.
You find
yourself preoccupied with things you didn’t have to think about when
you were young, such as health and, oh, burial plots. You go to the doctor a
lot. You catch yourself boring people with your infirmities and operations
— the same way your old aunts used to do, causing you to try to
suppress yawns and tactfully change the subject. (“That’s very
sad, Aunt Louise. Say, did you watch the Tigers’ game last
night?”)
The most
shocking thing about getting old is that it’s happening to, of all people,
you. You’ve always known that old people forget things and repeat
themselves a lot — but you? Now your kids keep telling
you, in a tone somewhere between pity and impatience, “You already
said that, Dad.”
![[Breaker quote for Getting Up There: Warning: adult material]](2006breakers/061019.gif) Although,
when you imagined yourself getting
old, you knew your body might fail, you assumed that your mind would still
continue to be the same lucid instrument it always was. Your personality
wouldn’t change. How could it? Except in a few superficial details, you
would still be you. The idea of
you-with-a-different-mind, if it had ever occurred to you, would have seemed
a contradiction in terms. Sort of like a personality transplant.
Not that there
aren’t some advantages to aging. After my ankle surgery last year, I
discovered that using a cane caused young people to treat me with courtesy
and veneration. They called me “sir” and held doors open for
me. So I’ve kept using the cane even though the foot has healed.
It’s a nice prop. It doesn’t attract young women, but it drives
the more mature chicks wild. I can’t wait to get my walker; I’ll
have to beat them off with my cane.
Of course as
you age one of the biggest changes in your life is that, every day, you have
to eat your weight in pills. Doctor’s orders. Keeping track of them all
is hard enough; but they also come with warnings like this: “Side
effects may include loss of appetite, dizziness, diarrhea, erectile
dysfunction, cancer of the esophagus, and Lou Gehrig’s
disease.” What, no Alzheimer’s?
After reading
all these cautions, you may wonder if just jumping off your roof might have
fewer adverse consequences. Unless you want to take even more pills to deal
with the side effects, you may finally just decide to take some Alka-Seltzer
and hope for the best.
At least
you’re not alone. Old friends, whom you’ve known from your
youth, are going through the same thing. You make rueful jokes about it
(“The wee hours have become the wee-wee hours”) and
compare notes on products, mostly from the drug store, you never thought
you’d need.
Getting old is
like adolescence In reverse. Your body keeps — wait! I already said that,
didn’t I?
Joseph Sobran |
||
| Copyright © 2006 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
|
||
|
||
|
Archive Table of Contents
Current Column Return to the SOBRAN’S home page. |
||
|
|
| FGF E-Package columns by Joe Sobran, Sam Francis, Paul Gottfried, and others are available in a special e-mail subscription provided by the Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation. Click here for more information. |