It was the late 1970s, I think. Ed, Tim and I, college buddies, returning for our university’s Homecoming were just getting on with our careers in business, law, and politics. As we walked a street popular with college students a group looked at us and passed by mumbling to each other, we picked up on a single line, “Ugg, old people.”
That was 45 years ago. Now they, if they have been lucky enough to live as long as we have, are in their mid-sixties wondering where all the time went and wondering why their pee pees have to wee wee all the time.
Even with the wrinkles and sags glaring at them each morning they won’t yet get it with a brain insisting, “You’ve got this, you’ve always had this,” while their bodies cringe and mumble, “What the fuck were you thinking.”
After a recovery of a month or so that once took a few days, they might consider their brains inability to adjust to their bodies slow decay. Not likely yet, as they struggle to hold on to what they once knew.
It is not until the brain starts giving them hints, like the time at breakfast not long ago when my wife suddenly remembered that she promised to call someone. Not knowing the number, she jerked up from her seat went to the counter asking, “Do you by any chance have a phone book?” “Well no,” they responded but went into the kitchen to check. A few minutes later, delivering a small miracle, they had an old phone book and handed it to her. She fumbled through a few pages and then with that puzzled look known to all of us in our 70’s, she returned to our table to ask, “Who was I going to call?”
Or that favorite example of me, when I needed to rush to the bank before it closed to get a document notarized for a grant request.
I frantically looked around my desk. Couldn’t find it. I went up to the bedroom, thoroughly searched the car, the patio, the living room, the kitchen, both bathrooms and storeroom. Nothing! I then did it all again. When it was too late to make it to the bank even if I found it, I flopped down on the couch spewing every vile expression I had collected in life, just as the document appeared. There it was in the one place I had not looked, flailing in the air in my very own hand.
No, it would not matter if I ran into those youngsters calling Ed, Tim and I old and tried to tell them how their bodies and brains were trumpeting that the end was coming.
But it is, and I just feel lucky to have lived long, known many, enjoyed much, besides, like Mark Twain, “I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”
Richard Kimball
Sign up on my Blog at: richardkimball.org
or
Medium.com at: https://medium.com/@daffieduck2016