GETTING "OLD"

 Ask anyone over the age of 40 . . .  Yes, I said "FORTY" . . . they will tell you getting "old" sucks.  

Before 40 life is full of exciting adventures.  Falling in love, children, fullfilling careers, travel and all sorts of good things to fill our days.  Then one day you realize you can't read the small print on anything smaller than a bill board on the side of the road.  You go to the market and can't read the ingredients on a can of mixed vegetables. You go to a restaurant and if the lighting in the place is any less than the five thousand watt halogen lights in a Major League Baseball stadium you can't read the menu. You find yourself looking around to see if anyone else is using their cell phone flash light to illuminate their menu.  Suddenly driving at night becomes an issue. There are all sorts of little indications that your eyes are NOT what they used to be.                                                                                                                                   

Next thing to go is your hearing.  People no longer speak clearly, everyone "mumbles". The TV suddenly isn't loud enough for you to catch all the dialogue and your kids all speak too quickly and quietly. You are now asking people to repeat what they said or you are getting very good at reading lips. If none of that works you find yourself just nodding and agreeing with everything because you have no idea what was being said. As a result you are now the president of the PTO in your kids school.                                    

Add to all that your body decides it no longer wants to function as well as it used to.  You have aches and pains in the oddest places and your stomach no longer wants to digest Mexican food or any other food for that matter.  You are now spending a ridiculous amount of money on toilet paper each month and less money on food.                                                                                                                                          

Your body temperature refuses to remain a constant 97.4 degrees. If you're a woman you are either freezing or roasting.  There is no happy medium. It is either one extreme or the other.                           

Things that used to be fun are now a chore. I actually remember enjoying cooking. Finding new recipes to make for dinner or guests. Spending hours in the kitchen preparing a meal was fun. That ship has sailed! Now I want to order take out or just not eat because I can't stand being in the kitchen. (I literally can't stand without my back aching so that adds to the fun of spending hours on your feet preparing food.)      

And of course there is the whole sleep or lack of sleep issue. I can fall asleep in a chair at two in the afternoon but come eleven o'clock at night I am wide awake.  If I do fall asleep I wake up forty two times because I have to pee. There is no comfortable spot in the bed and it is either too hot or too cold.                        

The ultimate indignity is your hair.  If you are a man your hair decides it no longer wants to reside on your head. As it slowly disappears from your scalp it begins to flourish in your ears and nostrils. (I think I have actually seen men trying to do a "comb over" from their ears).  If you are a woman you have the opposite problem.  The hair not only continues to grow on your head it also begins to grow on your chin and upper lip. Suddenly you find yourself morphing into your great grandfather Luigi who sported a handlebar mustache and beard. 

All of this is because you have now entered the TWILIGHT ZONE !  You have no idea how or why this is all happening but you do know you don't like it. Who ever coined the phrase "Twilight years" had no idea just how right they were.

As the years pass things continue to get worse and worse until you find yourself telling people things like, "Don't get old", "This growing old stuff is for the birds" or "Just wait till you get to be my age, then you'll see what I'm talking about".  All this is understandable considering it is un chartered territory so every thing that now happens is unexpected and unwanted.  No one wants aches and pains. No one wants to walk with a cane or walker. No one wants to take 14 different pills each day. It just isn't natural.

But it IS !  It is a fact that we can't stop time. As the years, days, hours pass we grow older. Can't stop it, Can't change it. You, Me, We are ALL in this together and aging isn't something you can bypass unless you really prefer to die at 27 just so you don't ever have to feel old.  I personally enjoy being alive, even with all the "charming" adventures it brings.  Each day is a gift . . . some days I would prefer not to open that gift but then I think of all I would miss. As I sit here under the big maple tree here on The Man's farm I am not pain free but the aches and pains that have become a regular part of my aging life are nothing compared to the serenity I feel. The warm sun, the gentle breeze, the birds chirping all overshadow everything else that is going on in my life.  Sitting here reminds me of how much I am blessed and I wouldn't change that for the world.  

There are plenty of times in our daily old lives that we think we just can't put up with the aches, pains, worries and whatever but we CAN. We can, we do and we will because there is always SOMETHING that makes us know we would rather be here.   

I totally believe there is a God and Heaven. I know that once my days are done here on Earth there is a much better place that I will go but until that time I want to appreciate and enjoy every second of being alive and being old even though I REALLY am NOT old YET. 

SPIRIT NAME

If The Man was a Native American he might have a "Spirit" name, like "Wolf Hunter" or "Flies Like Bird" because he has done both.   But these days neither of those would apply so I believe that his spirit name would be changed to  "AIR TALKER".   The Man talks to the air CONSTANTLY !!!  

I imagine he thinks he is talking to me but when he is 2 rooms away I can't hear a word he is saying yet I can hear him going on and on about something.  This is an every day, one hundred times a day occurrence and I just laugh to myself time after time.  The good thing is that his memory is getting worse by the day so even if he thinks he is telling me something he won't remember that ten minutes later. 

I've written before about how The Man has a habit of starting a conversation just as I am walking out the door.  It seems there is some correlation between my body being in motion that triggers his need to start talking.  Sometimes I stop and listen for a few seconds just to make sure he is not imparting some wisdom but I soon realize he is just talking for the sake of talking.  This fact is strange because we can be in the same room/car for hours and he will never say a word.  The second I stand up and move out of his immediate surrounding he starts talking.  It's like he needs to fill the space I was inhabiting with words.  

Most times it doesn't make a difference if he chooses to start a conversation as I walk away from him. He usually lets me get into the next room before he even starts talking so it's not like I'm still in his sight. I mean, I am out of the room and around the corner when I hear him start talking.  If I come back and ask what he was saying nine times out of ten he can't remember.  Occasionally he will start over with what ever wisdom he was spewing but even then I am at a loss as to what he is talking about because he starts most conversations in the middle. Apparently The Man has a LOT of conversations going on IN his head so at any moment when the words decided to spill from his mouth they make no sense to me because I was not inside his head for the first three minutes of his thought.  I have a lot of difficulty knowing who, "She" and "He" and "They" are when I'm brought into the conversation.  Because he has been thinking about a particular person or thing he seems to assume I know who or what he is referring to when he starts speaking.  One minute we will be talking about the local hardware store and the next minute he is saying something like, "They only had Chocolate and Vanilla today".  Now I am pretty sure the hardware store is not selling Chocolate and Vanilla screwdrivers or power drills so I am confused.  When The Man sees the look of puzzlement on my face he can't figure out why I am so stupid.  It's a game for me, trying to figure out the train of thought even though the train has derailed three stations back.

As I sit here in the living room, three rooms away from where The Man is sitting watching TV I can hear him talking to me.  I know he is talking TO me because even though there are times when I think he has indeed lost his mind I do know he really is all there.  It's almost like he thinks I have super powers and can hear him no matter where he is.  There are times when I don't answer so he will walk into the room I am in to ask if I heard him.  When I say I didn't hear him he is AMAZED . . .  how could I NOT hear what he was saying ????  Gee, there must be something wrong with my hearing!  

Now let us take a moment here to explore the flip side of this problem.  I will be sitting directly across the kitchen table from The Man and he doesn't hear a word I am saying.  I speak his name to get his attention and even though he is facing me I can see that the words are floating off into space never to be heard again.  When I ask him twenty minutes later if he has thought about what I said at dinner I receive the blank look and the question, "WHAT?"  He never heard me speak to him and he will SWEAR I never did. 

As frustrating as all this can be I am beginning to use it to entertain myself when things get too dull. I walk through the room moving my mouth but saying nothing. Most times he doesn't even notice until I am out of the room and then it will dawn on him that I must have been saying something.  I naturally deny it. When I am in another room and I hear him talking I just let him go on and then two hours later I will ask what he was talking about earlier. He can't remember and it drives him nuts trying to remember what important piece of information he was sharing with me.  

It's all in good fun and I wonder if anything will change when he get his new hearing aids next month.

LITTLE MIDDLE BRAIN

 The comedian Jeanne Robertson always refers to her husband as "Left Brain".  In many of her hilarious shows she will talk about "Left Brain" and the things he does. She and I are kindred spirits although I must say she is often a lot kinder to the opposite sex than I am. 

This blog has been forming in my mind for a few days now so this morning I did some Google searching to see just what information I could find regarding our brains and how they work.  Here is a very watered down version of what I found. . .  the front of our brain controls body movement, personality, problem-solving, concentration and planning. . . the middle of our brain governs emotions and long-term memory   . . .  the back of the brain deals with balance and coordination.  Those are the basics of the brain front to back.  As for left and right, well, people with a dominant left side of their brain tend to be more logical and people who favor their right brain are more creative.  

My conclusion from all of this is I have a strong frontal lobe because I am good at problem solving and planning. The middle of my brain isn't as strong because I can't remember shit and most of the time I am an emotional mess. As for the back of my brain, well, that just depends on the day although my balance is quite good I am not coordinated. (I discovered that fact when, years ago, I tried to do aerobics and keep falling over my feet and the feet of everyone around me.  If the group was sliding left I was sliding right. It was not pretty. I gave up on all exercise shortly after that).  I also think I am a fairly even split between Left Brain and Right Brain.  I am logical and I like to think I am creative.  I can figure out how to get a couch through a door way and I enjoy arts and crafts.  All in all I guess my brain is working fairly evenly on all counts. 

As for The Man,  I have concluded he does not HAVE a brain !  None, nothing, nada, nien !  This conclusion comes from the happenings of the past week when The Man's nephew came to put in a new bathroom door. The job involved taking out the old door and its frame and the surrounding molding. It is much more of a job than I would ever attempt but I KNOW I can't do it so I would never try. But for the past 2 months we have been trying to get someone here to do this work and no one wants the job. And so we asked Nephew if he thought he could do it and he said "yes".  He had some difficulty on Tuesday getting the frame straight so The Man stepped in to help.  I stood in the kitchen watching the 2 of them try to figure out how to get the door to hang straight.  I could see exactly where the problem was but knew better than to offer any advice.  By that evening the door was still hanging crooked, Nephew had gone home to drink and The Man sat at the kitchen table trying to figure out how to fix the problem.  

Let me pause here to tell you about my father and his brother . . .   my dad could fix anything but he would  usually get to the simple solution by way of China.  What I mean is that nothing was a "simple" fix. Hanging a mirror could involved major renovations to a wall where I would just stick a nail in the same wall and hang the mirror.  

The Man appears to be the same way. Nothing is simple or he just can't see the simple answer.  By Wednesday morning The Man was still agonizing over how to get the door to hang straight when I took a chance and made a suggestion. Naturally his first reaction was, "No, that won't work!" End of discussion. But then I could see the wheels were turning in his brain and an hour later when Nephew showed up The Man was telling Nephew what to do.  We now have a new bathroom door that shuts and even locks. The 2 workers were very pleased with themselves and I just started thinking about how I could turn this into a blog. 

In case you thing there may be hope for our younger generation let me stop you right there.  While The Man and Nephew were struggling with the door I was in the basement with our 2 neighbor boys cleaning our all the trash that was down there. (Not my idea of a fun day but this was one of the many things The Man had on his "To Do" list for the summer.  Included in the trash to be removed was a large, old kitchen table. One of those ones from the 1950's with the metal legs. It was heavy so the boys had to struggle to get it up the basement stairs.  When they got to the top of the stairs and had to get the table through the back door they were stuck. Literally.  I watched from the bottom of the steps as the 2 of them tried to squeeze the table straight through but the door way was inches smaller than the width of the table. Before I could come up the stairs to show them how to turn the table The Man arrived to direct the boys.  His suggestions were as futile as the boys so that at one point the table was actually wedged in the door way with no hope of going in or out.  The boys managed to pop the table loose like a cork from a bottle but it was still INSIDE the house. I took pity on them all and told them to try turning the table on its side, put 2 legs out the door, swing the table sideways and then follow out with the back legs.  Easy Peasy.  At first they ignored me but after struggling a few more minutes they figured it out and the table made it out to the garage.  

I don't know if it was because I was an only child and had to figure things out for myself or if I inherited this ability from my mom but where ever it came from I'm glad those parts of my brain are functioning. My brain parts that control the ability to do calculus or learn a foreign language never formed and that is just fine with me as long as I can figure out how to get a 5 pound chicken into a 2 quart pot.