I turned 70 on the 4th and I can honestly say that my body did not recognize any difference from the day before. My mind, however, rebelled against the idea of being 70 - though if you are mathematically inclined you will know that our western system of numerical reckoning is the decimal, base ten, or denary; it is a system based on tens. So, then, "70" might actually be the final number of the sixties (it's like 1-10, 11-20, 21-30 etc - let's not talk about 0-9). Still, that sort of rationalization did not do a lot for me emotionally. My problem is that most of the people I know (not all) who are 70 and up, truly are "OLD." Consequently, I wasn't quite sure how to respond graciously to the many well wishes for beginning a new decade - I knew trying to explain that mathematically a new 70s decade actually begins next year would fall on deaf ears - instead of resorting to reason, I decided to take Charlie for a walk in the woods; a fast 4.5 miles over the hilly parts of the Great Brooks park stopping along the way to do pushups. In as much as my memory has not yet failed me, I only did a hundred pushups; remembering that a couple of months ago after a long lay off I did 225 pushups along with a full workout and the only part of my body that worked for the next three days was my eyelids. Still, I know that eventually we all succumb to the ravages of time and breaking body parts, but, it is like I told my incredulous friend: "When I die I want to die in good health."
I remember as a kid living far out in the country of northern Wisconsin. My cousins and I knew of a great sledding hill near our small farm house that often beckoned us out into the subzero weather for a bit of slightly dangerous "fun." I say slightly dangerous, because, while the hill was not mountainous in size, it was still quite steep and at the bottom of the hill there was a wooded thicket with a narrow pathway leading through it. Had it not been for the trail at the bottom of the hill no one could have gone unscathed sledding down its icy slope. Only the trail at the bottom of the hill made the hill potentially sledable (a word that would be in the dictionary if kids wrote them). As you might imagine, making sure the sled missed the trees and went careening down the trailhead was a matter of no small importance. For the most part, we did OK as there was a primitive steering device on the sled and my cousin and I would drag either the right foot or the left to augment the sled's primitive navigational device. But, there was this one time when we decided to substitute the much faster toboggan for the sled. Unquestionably, we were right in assessing the toboggan's speed; it was clearly a speedy once in a life time trip down the hill. Unfortunately, there was no steering mechanism and it split right down the middle when we hit the tree at, what I estimated at the time, was 75 miles an hour; though, if I am to be completely honest and I seldom am, it quite probable that we were not going more than 67 mph.
The life lesson I learned from crashing into the tree is fairly simple: Old age is like sledding: the closer you get to the bottom the faster you are going; so in life, the older you get, the faster time seems to go, until everything stops like when the toboggan hit the tree. Now and again I will invite one of the kids to go sledding with me, but for some inexplicable reason they always seem to have something else to do.
I remember as a kid living far out in the country of northern Wisconsin. My cousins and I knew of a great sledding hill near our small farm house that often beckoned us out into the subzero weather for a bit of slightly dangerous "fun." I say slightly dangerous, because, while the hill was not mountainous in size, it was still quite steep and at the bottom of the hill there was a wooded thicket with a narrow pathway leading through it. Had it not been for the trail at the bottom of the hill no one could have gone unscathed sledding down its icy slope. Only the trail at the bottom of the hill made the hill potentially sledable (a word that would be in the dictionary if kids wrote them). As you might imagine, making sure the sled missed the trees and went careening down the trailhead was a matter of no small importance. For the most part, we did OK as there was a primitive steering device on the sled and my cousin and I would drag either the right foot or the left to augment the sled's primitive navigational device. But, there was this one time when we decided to substitute the much faster toboggan for the sled. Unquestionably, we were right in assessing the toboggan's speed; it was clearly a speedy once in a life time trip down the hill. Unfortunately, there was no steering mechanism and it split right down the middle when we hit the tree at, what I estimated at the time, was 75 miles an hour; though, if I am to be completely honest and I seldom am, it quite probable that we were not going more than 67 mph.
The life lesson I learned from crashing into the tree is fairly simple: Old age is like sledding: the closer you get to the bottom the faster you are going; so in life, the older you get, the faster time seems to go, until everything stops like when the toboggan hit the tree. Now and again I will invite one of the kids to go sledding with me, but for some inexplicable reason they always seem to have something else to do.
RSS Feed