I just turned 76 years old.
Constantly adjusting to the aging process can be an energy sucker:
Clutching the bannister when going down the stairs — no more bounding up and down effortlessly.
Ditto for getting out of bed. The operative word now is SLOWLY. No leaps.
My kitchen cabinet has an ever-growing coterie of pills and prescriptions.
My kitchen cabinet doors have a growing list of Yahrzeit notifications.
Forget buying scented candles for romantic evenings at home. I’m now focused on making sure my stock of memorial candles doesn’t need replenishing.
New age spots and sun spots sprout up daily.
I eat less, but the digital scale registers more.
When we have couples over for Shabbat dinner, I’m hyper focused on whether our porch is adequately lit and the step down to the path still has the reflectors so no one falls and breaks a leg, hip, or neck. The menu is the least of it.
Chewing gum and drinking diet soda give me heartburn and gas — in that order
And everywhere I go, I look around to see if I am the oldest one in the room — and I’m beginning to think I am. (Except at Friday night services, that is.)
I can’t remember the last time the employees in the thrift store I visit every Tuesday because its 20 percent off for senior citizens actually asked me if I was one.
I’m buying less and investing more in experiences.
My good news is more centered on health, not wardrobe acquisitions or decorative home enhancements.
I’m cutting off doing chores, errands, bills, house cleaning and plant watering at 7 p.m., not 9 p.m., because I’m simply too tired.
Every place I travel, I now lose something. This time it was my prized gold ring for my right thumb. I thought it was my hearing aids I misplaced, but they were found intact, in one of the zippered compartments of my suitcase when I got home and unpacked. That’s because I always “forget” to wear them.
Friends are being diagnosed with crappy things and it does seem like funerals and shiva are beginning to replace cocktail parties at an alarming rate.
Decades ago, when I saw a dancer on stage, I’d say to myself: I could do that.
Years ago I said: I used to be able to do that.
Now I say: How in the hell can they still do that?
I keep forgetting stuff — like one grandson’s birthday and the spelling of one of my granddaughter’s names. That why I now have the password to my computer written on a Post It note, Scotch taped to my key board.
Rather than participate with abandon, I now am finding myself watching my grown adult sons interact with each other — trying to imagine how it will be when I’m no longer with them.
But I’m not sad.
And most days I revel in the reduced responsibilities I have at this stage in my life.
And I’m re-discovering so many interesting things lying around my own house. Like a copy of Life Magazine I bought and saved, though I can’t remember why, in 1991.
An essay on one of the last pages caught my attention — “Picturing Happiness” by Lynda Barry.
She writes about finding a very old picture of her parents the summer she was 13, shortly before her father left the family. A surge of memories of happier times for her household came roaring back as she studied the photo of the smiling, exuberant young couple. And it made her sad.
But years later, after she too married and divorced, she had an epiphany:
Happiness is happiness,
no matter how things turns out.
It still counts.
I’ll never quite look at old pictures of happier times in the same way again. Thank you, Lynda Barry, for reminding me to glory in those fleeting moments of joy.
As William Wordsworth wrote so long ago, “Though nothing can bring back the hour of splendor in the grass, glory in the flower, we will grieve not, rather find, strength in what remains behind.”
Here’s to all life’s joyous moments — lasting or short-lived…experienced in youth or old age…
And Keep Preserving Your Bloom,
Iris Ruth Pastor