Sometimes I catch myself describing someone as old then suddenly realizing that they are younger than me. I just seem to have a hard time thinking of myself as old.
More than calling people OLD, I find calling someone ELDERLY after age 70 or so, insulting ..lol I just can't wrap my head around that!
One thing that annoys me is that whenever I read my doctor's notes, she describes me as being "sedentary," presumably because I tell her that I spend ten hours a day or more behind my computer. I do that because I work from my computer, and her use of the term makes me sound like I lie around on the couch watching television all day. That annoys me. I've told her about it a couple of times but I still keep finding the word used. Yes, I spend ten hours or more behind the computer, but I also walk at least ten blocks a day. I snowshoe or walk through deep snow two miles each way, to and from my land up north each winter. I shovel a fairly long drive, parking area, and sidewalk every time it snows. I climb the ladder to the back porch of my house to shovel snow off of the roof. When it's not too cold, I sometimes choose to walk a mile each way, to and from, the store rather than driving. In the summer, I cut down trees, often with an axe but more often with a chainsaw. I clear and haul brush, keeping the trails to my camera locations open, and I spend a great deal of time walking through the woods. At 63, I hiked a hundred miles of the Appalachian Trail, which mostly involves climbing over mountain ranges. I take a break from my work off and on during the day to spend a few minutes on my exercise glider, and have been using it nearly every night before going to bed. I go to bed after midnight, am usually up before nine, and it has been years since I have sat on the couch watching television for even a half hour. I will be sixty-five years old in a few months. Does she expect me to be climbing Mount Kilimanjaro once a month or hiking the Appalachian Trail every other summer?
Don't tell her you sit at the computer for 10 hrs. I think you are doing fine judging from what you said you do. I didn't realize How much I walk in the course of a regular day even if I don't go out. Since I got my fitbit, even a lazy day at home gives me 1.5 miles.
Darby & Joan…a tender loving celebration of growing old (anniversary I think) Etching by Dendy, Sadler, & Boucher To a Beautiful Lady of a Certain Age by Felix Dennis Lady, lady do not weep - What is gone is gone. Now sleep. Turn your pillow, dry your tears, Count thy sheep and not thy years. Nothing good can come of this. Time rules all, my dearest,'tis But folly to be waging war On one who never lost before. Lady, this is all in vain, Youth can never come again; We have drunk the summer wine, None can make a stitch in time. Nip and tuck 'til crack of doom, What is foretold in the womb May not be forsworn with gold - Nor may time be bought or sold. Dearest, do I love thee less, Do I shrink from thy caress? Think you I could cease to care? Never was there one so fair! Lady, lady do not weep - What is gone is gone. Now sleep. Lean against me, calm your fears, Count thy blessings, not thy years.
What's positive about growing old is that you can do anything you want and be your authentic self if you choose to be. Here is a heartwarming story of an unlikely friendship:
Norman Lear is 93 and still "living large". In this interview on the CBS Morning Show, He was asked if he liked being called 'Senior Citizen', 'Elderly', or 'Old'? He answered, " I call myself 'Older'...I'm clearly older than a lot of people but 'old'?...Not yet."
Glad you liked it Ruby. I thought it was one of the best too. I had a video to post just before it and it's not there so I'll fix that. But it's not like "Ricky and Doris"…they're unique for sure. I noticed how friendly the New Yorkers were to them.
Most people expect to grow old. Some don't, I will. Most people think older is wiser. To me, I'm not yet wise, therefore not older. Most people believe when they retire, they have done enough. I am not finished doing what I believe I am here for, thus I can never retire. Most people think old people are slow. I slow down just to see what those who are younger and faster have missed. Most people believe that when they get old then that special time between a man and a woman disappear. I say it's never been better than now and it will probably be better later. It is said that getting old is just a state of mind. Yes, I agree, but it's the state of my heart and determination even more. It's only with a little age, that I found that out. Growing old means grey hair and wrinkled skin. Only the young have to take the time to compete with their looks. I take that extra time studying things I never studied before. Old? When I no longer study, build, smile, or laugh. When I lose interest in the things around me, or say no to my wife when she advances, then, yes maybe then I will think that getting older is something less than a positive experience. It's only because of age, that I know how much more I can achieve.
This is a story that I received in an e-mail. Enjoy! This is a story of an aging couple told by their son who was President of NBC NEWS. This is a wonderful piece by Michael Gartner, editor of newspapers large and small and president of NBC News. In 1997, he won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing. It is well worth reading, and a few good chuckles are guaranteed. Here goes... My father never drove a car. Well, that's not quite right. I should say I never saw him drive a car. He quit driving in 1927, when he was 25 years old, and the last car he drove was a 1926 Whippet. "In those days," he told me when he was in his 90s, "to drive a car you had to do things with your hands, and do things with your feet, and look every which way, and I decided you could walk through life and enjoy it or drive through life and miss it." At which point my mother, a sometimes salty Irishwoman, chimed in: "Oh, bull shit!" she said. "He hit a horse." "Well," my father said, "there was that, too." So my brother and I grew up in a household without a car. The neighbors all had cars -- the Kollingses next door had a green 1941 Dodge, the VanLaninghams across the street a gray 1936 Plymouth, the Hopsons two doors down a black 1941 Ford -- but we had none. My father, a newspaperman in Des Moines , would take the streetcar to work and, often as not, walk the 3 miles home. If he took the streetcar home, my mother and brother and I would walk the three blocks to the streetcar stop, meet him and walk home together. My brother, David, was born in 1935, and I was born in 1938, and sometimes, at dinner, we'd ask how come all the neighbors had cars but we had none. "No one in the family drives," my mother would explain, and that was that. But, sometimes, my father would say, "But as soon as one of you boys turns 16, we'll get one." It was as if he wasn't sure which one of us would turn 16 first. But, sure enough , my brother turned 16 before I did, so in 1951 my parents bought a used 1950 Chevrolet from a friend who ran the parts department at a Chevy dealership downtown. It was a four-door, white model, stick shift, fender skirts, loaded with everything, and, since my parents didn't drive, it more or less became my brother's car. Having a car but not being able to drive didn't bother my father, but it didn't make sense to my mother. So in 1952, when she was 43 years old, she asked a friend to teach her to drive. She learned in a nearby cemetery, the place where I learned to drive the following year and where, a generation later, I took my two sons to practice driving. The cemetery probably was my father's idea. "Who can your mother hurt in the cemetery?" I remember him saying more than once. For the next 45 years or so, until she was 90, my mother was the driver in the family. Neither she nor my father had any sense of direction, but he loaded up on maps -- though they seldom left the city limits -- and appointed himself navigator. It seemed to work. Still, they both continued to walk a lot. My mother was a devout Catholic, and my father an equally devout agnostic, an arrangement that didn't seem to bother either of them through their 75 years of marriage. (Yes, 75 years, and they were deeply in love the entire time.) He retired when he was 70, and nearly every morning for the next 20 years or so, he would walk with her the mile to St. Augustin's Church. She would walk down and sit in the front pew, and he would wait in the back until he saw which of the parish's two priests was on duty that morning. If it was the pastor, my father then would go out and take a 2-mile walk, meeting my mother at the end of the service and walking her home. If it was the assistant pastor, he'd take just a 1-mile walk and then head back to the church. He called the priests "Father Fast" and "Father Slow." After he retired, my father almost always accompanied my mother whenever she drove anywhere, even if he had no reason to go along. If she were going to the beauty parlor, he'd sit in the car and read, or go take a stroll or, if it was summer, have her keep the engine running so he could listen to the Cubs game on the radio. In the evening, then, when I'd stop by, he'd explain: "The Cubs lost again. The millionaire on second base made a bad throw to the millionaire on first base, so the multimillionaire on third base scored." If she were going to the grocery store, he would go along to carry the bags out -- and to make sure she loaded up on ice cream. As I said, he was always the navigator, and once, when he was 95 and she was 88 and still driving, he said to me, "Do you want to know the secret of a long life?" "I guess so," I said, knowing it probably would be something bizarre. "No left turns," he said. "What?" I asked. "No left turns," he repeated. "Several years ago, your mother and I read an article that said most accidents that old people are in happen when they turn left in front of oncoming traffic. As you get older, your eyesight worsens, and you can lose your depth perception, it said. So your mother and I decided never again to make a left turn." "What?" I said again. "No left turns," he said. "Think about it.. Three rights are the same as a left, and that's a lot safer. So we always make three rights." "You're kidding!" I said, and I turned to my mother for support. "No," she said, "your father is right. We make three rights. It works." But then she added: "Except when your father loses count." I was driving at the time, and I almost drove off the road as I started laughing. "Loses count?" I asked. "Yes," my father admitted, "that sometimes happens. But it's not a problem. You just make seven rights, and you're okay again." I couldn't resist. "Do you ever go for 11?" I asked. "No," he said " If we miss it at seven, we just come home and call it a bad day. Besides, nothing in life is so important it can't be put off another day or another week." My mother was never in an accident, but one evening she handed me her car keys and said she had decided to quit driving. That was in 1999, when she was 90. She lived four more years, until 2003. My father died the next year, at 102. They both died in the bungalow they had moved into in 1937 and bought a few years later for $3,000. (Sixty years later, my brother and I paid $8,000 to have a shower put in the tiny bathroom -- the house had never had one. My father would have died then and there if he knew the shower cost nearly three times what he paid for the house.) He continued to walk daily -- he had me get him a treadmill when he was 101 because he was afraid he'd fall on the icy sidewalks but wanted to keep exercising -- and he was of sound mind and sound body until the moment he died. One September afternoon in 2004, he and my son went with me when I had to give a talk in a neighboring town, and it was clear to all three of us that he was wearing out, though we had the usual wide-ranging conversation about politics and newspapers and things in the news. A few weeks earlier, he had told my son, "You know, Mike, the first hundred years are a lot easier than the second hundred." At one point in our drive that Saturday, he said, "You know, I'm probably not going to live much longer." "You're probably right," I said. "Why would you say that?" He countered, somewhat irritated. "Because you're 102 years old," I said. "Yes," he said, "you're right." He stayed in bed all the next day. That night, I suggested to my son and daughter that we sit up with him through the night. He appreciated it, he said, though at one point, apparently seeing us look gloomy, he said: "I would like to make an announcement. No one in this room is dead yet." An hour or so later, he spoke his last words: "I want you to know," he said, clearly and lucidly, "that I am in no pain. I am very comfortable. And I have had as happy a life as anyone on this earth could ever have." A short time later, he died. I miss him a lot, and I think about him a lot. I've wondered now and then how it was that my family and I were so lucky that he lived so long. I can't figure out if it was because he walked through life, or because he quit taking left turns." Life is too short to wake up with regrets. So love the people who treat you right. Forget about the one's who don't. Believe everything happens for a reason. If you get a chance, take it and if it changes your life, let it. Nobody said life would be easy, they just promised it would most likely be worth it." ENJOY LIFE NOW - IT HAS AN EXPIRATION DATE!
One like is definitely not appropriate. Pehaps a written "102" likes, one for every year the old man lived, might suffice. Or, an unknown amount of likes for each left hand turn not taken. Either way, a fantastic story and a couple of great lessons on life!!
Lately, I've been mulling over in my mind exactly what the premise of the OP here is. How to not be constantly aware of mortality. What mind-set might a person develop, allowing less attention to be paid to the everyday little issues, the aches and pains, the medications, the irritations and aggravations which seem magnified more now that I am old, and were easily "glossed over" as a young man. So I considered an uncle, whom I visited in 1993, went clean across the U.S. to see him, clear out of the "blue". He was my Dad's favored brother, 10 years younger, but by then, in his late 80s. He had just bought a new car, saying he likely would not live long enough to wear it out, but, "What hell, if I drop dead suddenly, the kid will get a nice new car!" His attitude was to be marvelled at. He was not ailing, nor expecting to die soon, but had made peace with the issue. Another remark I recall him making was that "the writing is already on the wall". I decided it's mostly about "mind-set", the ability to maintain earnest control over one's runaway thoughts which creep in to the subconscious all so often. Nowadays, I try to proceed that way. Frank
I don't mind being old at all. Life is much easier now. I might feel differently if I don't age well and wind up in a nursing home or something. So far, so good. I really enjoyed the story about the man who lived 102 years.