Joys of Getting Old

For the most part getting old is kind of a bitter, sweet victory of life. To me the fact that I lived long enough to get this old is an accomplishment in itself. Thinking back on my youth I suppose I could have written a book titled “A Wild and Crazy Guy” except somebody had already used that line. Which is one of the downsides to getting old; most of what you come up with, someone has already used. Case in point my three marriages and two live in girlfriends. On the up side my current loving wife was also married twice before. Guess I wasn’t new to her either.

Discounting all the aches and pains associated with old age, being old has lots of advantages. For one thing I don’t have to worry about what to ware or even how clean what I am wearing may be. If I miss my mouth every now and then when eating, who cares? The up side is I don’t have to remember what I had for lunch. All I have to do is look at the front of my shirt. That way I can always fix something different for dinner. Because variety is so important to us old codgers; except when we are telling stories.

There is a reason that old people tell you the same thing over and over again. You see the things we tell you are of interest to us and therefore we feel they should be of interest to you too. But in our long lives we have met lots and lots of people. It is not our fault that all you young people keep showing up at the very moment we are relating that interesting story, again. You could always just not listen. We do that all the time; and there is a reason for that too. We are trying to remember that interesting story but it is hard to do when you keep telling us that you know it already.  

Another joy of getting old is that almost everything we own is paid for, including our cars. Think how much peace of mind that is for us not to have a car payment or a lease payment. We no longer have to run around here and there to justify having to shell out all that money each and every month. We have been there and done that, so now we can take our time whenever we are behind the wheel of our paid in full car. Let’s face it old people don’t have to participate in you young whippersnapper’s rat race. On top of that we have no where to be at a certain time. All we have to do is cruse down the road with no worries about who is in front or behind us. We earned that right, right?

Although being old also means we have a few things that don’t work as well as they used to. We don’t really care because for us the hardship happened so slowly we still think things are the way they used to be. My first clue that my hearing was going was when I asked my wife a question about a TV show we were watching and she yelled back the answer because I had the sound turned up so loud. However she has her own set of non-working parts. For her it is her nose. Back in the day she would use a dab or sprits of perfume here or there on her body. She uses the same parts of her body to put the perfume on only now she uses the same method as I did when I had enough hair to use hair tonic. Anyway I think that is the reason my eyebrows are so curly now a days.

Even with all these advantages to getting old there does seem to be one or two drawbacks to this old age thing. I am talking about that extra 20 or so pounds that just showed up for no reason what so ever. No matter what I do to try to get rid of it, it just won’t go away. At first I thought it was just me and I had some sort of ailment causing me to gain this extra weight, but it seems my friends are also afflicted by this strange ailment. Perhaps it is an old epidemic. All I know for sure is that it can’t be my diet because I am eating less food than I did 15 or 20 years ago. I am also eating healthier food. No salt, 2% milk, little or no sugar, very little red meat and yet that 20 pounds showed up and stuck around. By around I mean around my waist. If you see me from the side you would think I am smuggling bowling balls. I exercise, take long walks after meals, and still the fat remains. Nothing I do seems to help. Nothing my friends do help them either. They are having the very same problem as I am. We all eat less, exercise more, and look fatter. If I had only known this is what they meant when they told me I was living in Fat City I would have moved to the suburbs.