I accidentally turned 65.
I never intended for this to happen.
I, like so many, thought it could never actually happen to them.
The end of my denial struck like a train on Flag Day this year, a birthday I share with Donald Trump.
My first conclusion about this awkward milestone is that it doesn’t seem to hurt — yet — as badly as I figured it surely would.
Relieved, I seem to be the same ol’ Dave, but not that old.
I distinctly remember thinking, often, as a child, then as an adolescent, then as a young adult, and then as a middle-aged dad and — I’ll stop there. But I remember on several occasions watching my aging grandparents, great aunts and neighbors seem to just exude a catalog of horrible things that happen to humans as they age.
They all seemed to move so slowly, all the time. Half of them couldn’t hear. The other half couldn’t see to read or anything farther than the length of their arms. They all seemed to have noise and teeth issues. None of them had any interest in watching “Gigantor” cartoons or eating Pez tablets from between the cushions on the couch.
They were pretty boring.
They did all seem to like sitting, riding in a car and talking about what they ate, what they might eat and what they would like to eat.
I don’t move slowly. Well, most of the time. Well, some of the time.
We have a security camera in our backyard, because it’s good to know when a gang of armed, demonic assassins are headed for the back door. All we’ve mostly seen in the camera are a few demonic raccoons and a lot of wind.
But one night, I came home late from work and was alerted shortly after by my handy backyard-camera-iPhone-security alert.
After a few moments of fumbling with my phone and struggling to remember how to work it, a video clip appeared of this really creepy hunch-back thing kind of limp-shuffling right across my back yard, headed for the back door.
It not only set off the motion detector, but the sound-alert system, too. Whatever it was, it was squatty and hunched over and making this awful wheezy puffing sound as it mumbled something unintelligible, ending with this very sad and pathetic groan and — oh. It was me.
It was the same guy I see reflected in my car windows while I fumble with the door locks.
I look like my father. I jingle my keys like my father. I sing parts of old tunes like my father. Well, I have much more sophisticated musical taste than did my dad.
He would forever be humming bars from, “I’ve got a lov-er-ly bunch of coco-nuts…”
I, on the other hand, haunt the room with classics such as the opening theme from “HR Puffinstuff” or any number of masterpieces from “Gilligan’s Island.”
I’m pretty sure that everybody in the newsroom appreciates it. Although, since my tinnitus has taken on a pitch and volume close to a million cicadas in a hot garage, I can’t exactly hear their approvals, or really much of anything.
I can still see tho, at least out of my good eye.
Several years back I awoke blind in my right eye without any symptoms or warning. One of my fancy specialist kind of doctors said it was an injury-provoked cataract.
He said I was certainly hit in the eye the previous day, but I don’t remember it. I joked with my wife that she must have hit me in the face while I slept in an effort to stop what she thinks is my snoring, but I don’t snore.
I think she suffers from female tinnitus, which strikes women at night and sounds like really loud snoring.
Whatever it was, all I could see was faint fuzzy light. I was too busy at work and too much a coward to get my eye sliced open and a fake lens put in. So I waited a year or so, endlessly mis-aiming through doors and overfilling my coffee cup, until I tried to ski between two trees on a steep mountain and didn’t see the second tree in my blind spot.
It’s all good now, except for when I’m driving into the sun and the light reflects off my fake eyeball lens and makes me sneeze, weaving into other lanes and traffic, weirdly, often on the interstate.
Other than that, and the constant itching, and the ability to make people think my eyes are closed all the time when they’re not, turning 65 was no different than turning 45, which is when I turned gray.
Which reminds me, that I’m not sure if I left the ice cream out again. I like to let it get a little soft and warm so it doesn’t make my teeth hurt.
But, other than that, getting old doesn’t seem to hurt or make much of a difference. And, as you can tell from reading this, I’m as sharp as I always was and don’t see any reason not to vote for Joe Biden.
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