"With these rickety old legs and watery eyes
It's hard to believe that I could pass for anybody's prize"
-Rodney Crowell
Making an inventory this morning of my collective aches and insults, after last night it occurred to me that my nocturnal complaints are beginning to affect our personal life.
Let's start with this right hip; I mean, they both hurt, but at night that right hip starts aching in a constant, burning way. Rolling over on it startles me awake. Rolling away from it, toward the center of the bed and my beloved P, leads to . . .
this chronic problem with my left shoulder. There was a time when I'd tweak it in the weight room and go see my friend Mark Williams the orthopod, who'd give me a couple dumb bell exercises ("for the dumb bell who doesn't know not to push a sore shoulder", I can already hear you saying) and tell me to go easy in the gym for maybe six weeks.
But now it's a constant companion, whether I'm assiduously exercising as I have lately, or just out working in the yard. So if I'm to roll to my left during the night, I must complete this yoga exercise of pulling my left arm out from under the sheets without hitting Peg in the nose, then flopping it above her pillow along the headboard to get a little relief, affecting a pose like a reclining "Heil Hitler" with my nose stick in my armpit. After a few minutes my shoulder taps me on itself to let me know it's uncomfortable, leading me to roll back onto the equally unhappy hip.
Rinse and repeat. All night. You can see why this would annoy even the most agreeable bedmate. It's like having a gaffed cobia in bed with you.
But that's not all. The old low back is starting to enter the cacophony, particularly after a long day sitting in this massive leather office chair. I did better when I worked at a standing desk before the storm, but there's no place in any of my offices for one of those, and a good one costs a fortune. So I sit, and by the time P gets home I'm shuffling stooped across the room to greet her, with the gait of one of those stereotypical geriatrics in an old MGM movie.
Yesterday at Wegman's I thought I was going to fall face-first into the ice cream freezer. No kidding. There was this "ka-thump" that came from my ticker, a not painful sensation but certainly an attention getter. I started to feel sick, and then the room started spinning. Being a fighter pilot, my main concern was looking foolish if I followed a stream of my own puke while falling face-first into the rack of ice cream sandwiches. They'd think I'd been drinking, but I hadn't had a toot in days. I mostly limit myself to one cup of coffee a day, so that's not it either.
Before I fell, mercifully, the whole episode passed, my equilibrium returned, the world began to regain its color, and I shuffled stooped and favoring one hip to the self-checkout line. Getting old is not for sissies.
P's definitely aging better than I am, which is probably best because my sense is that a failing body is a greater source of emotional pain for a woman than a man. For me these are the accumulated effects of living the sort of active, Teddy Roosevelt life I have for the most part. Society is pretty kind to a decrepit man under those circumstances. For a woman, not so much, which is terribly unfair but here we are. So it's best that P still turns head as she strides through life with this gait, long strides and shoulders thrown back, that always makes it look like she has somewhere to be, but now with me shuffling stooped along beside her.
My parents' decrepitude has me worried this may be, in part, the result of really unfortunate genes. But Mom had rheumatoid arthritis, uncontrolled HBP, uncontrolled GERD, renal failure, an entirely fused spine, and multiple mini-strokes that chopped her down from a walker to a wheelchair to a hospital bed in the space between my age now and her last year. I have very little of that. Dad smoked at least a pack of cigarettes a day for well over fifty years, and drank an entire bottle of scotch every night from about age 26 until he was into his 70s. Even with the best genes in the world, that routine is likely to land you curled up in your recliner, barely able to speak and unable to feel your feet. That he's made it 84 years is something of a miracle in itself.
So I reckon these are just infirmities to manage, and our era provides the means of doing that, pharmacological, nutritional, and lifestyle-driven, from which our ancestors (hell, our parents) would've benefited greatly as they completely fell apart by the time they were my age now.
One of our favorite games at night in front of the TV is guessing the age of the actor in the old rerun or movie we found through some streaming service. Last night it was the Avengers, a show that defined for my eleven-year-old sensibilities (it was already well into reruns by then) both superhero cool and what an attractive woman looks and acts like.
Diana Rigg as Emma Peel, secret agent extraordinaire. I was one smitten fifth-grader.
Her counterpart was John Steed, a dapper Englishman with umbrella and tweed jacket, who never took off his bowler even when fighting a roomful of villains. It was a campy take on the James Bond movie series that had taken off at about the same time, and was a lot more fun to watch.
Anyway, we were watching an episode from the 1964 season last night, four years into its six year run on the BBC, when P started asking about the age of Patrick Macnee, who played John Steed. This happens a lot in our house; Peg will start peppering me with questions, often about an actor's age or whether they're still alive, leading me to fumble for my iPhone so I can provide a stream of fun facts while we watch the show.
As it turned out Macnee, the gent in the above photo, was just turning 42 years old when they shot the 1964 season. Would you have guessed 60? Me too. It happens a lot. Folks just aged harder back then.
So I guess by the standards afforded in the year of my birth, I'm a pretty spry fellow and should be grateful for that. Besides, I think I've stumbled upon the perfect Halloween costume for this time next year.
Okay, I admit it: I only want to have an excuse to see P in that costume. She'd rock it.
Time to get to work--it's Veterans Day, Remembrance Day in the old, better tradition, a day when people who served in the military but mostly never saw action post photos of themselves on Facebook as part of some self-referential hagiography. But at least it closes the courthouses, and our offices, which means a little quiet time to get ready for this oral argument next week.
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