Grave at Mt. View Cemetery by ARP
I am sick and tired of thinking about aging. I have spent far too much of this homebound year of wondering if I am going to be too old to travel to far places when the pandemic ends. After all, at 75 I am technically “old.” I hadn’t thought about myself in that way until the CDC put me and many of my friends in a very special vaccination category because of age.
With winter weather, shuttered gyms, and a cat who sits in front of the screen whenever I try to stream exercise videos, I feel pretty creaky (and cranky). Somehow, I got this far in life thinking that if ate a healthy diet, watched my alcohol intake and did no harm, I wouldn’t have the aches and pains of aging. That notion has gone the way of my original hair color, bikinis and tap dancing lessons. Often stuck inside, it is all I can do to sit down without groaning. Where did this pain come from? Surely not aging!
Books on aging are all over the place—hundreds of them. I have several unopened volumes in my bookcase. One I have partially read because I like its title and respect the author is So Far So Good by Ursula LeGuin. It is a collection of poems— some funny, some poignant—written between 2014-2018. Lastly, of the many quotations about aging I have read in the course of writing this little piece, I think the best ones were by (of all people) George Burns. My favorite is this: “You can’t help getting older, but you don’t have to get old.”
HAVE A GOOD WEEK!
