Birthdays and Old Age

You've got two options for dealing with them...

Once again I’m in California with my son for my mom’s birthday and this time she’ll celebrate turning 98 if by “celebrate” you actually mean having a small piece of coconut crème pie because the first two pieces you cut for her were much too big and then complaining that the air conditioning is making the house too cold and wondering if there’s any way you could stop watching the Chargers-49er’s game and find her a Cowboy Movie starring Audie Murphy.

She likes Audie Murphy movies so I wondered how hard they were to find and how many of them he made and according to the internet the answer is 44.

Also according to the internet: Audie Murphy was a Real Life Badass before becoming an actor and during WW2 won a boat load of medals including the Congressional Medal of Honor for single-handedly holding off a company of German soldiers for an hour when he was just 19. (At 19 I was pretty busy trying to get adults with bad judgement to buy me a six-pack.) Audie also performed a bunch more Are-You-Shitting-Me? feats like fighting off Germans with a tank’s machine gun after the tank had been blown up.

While checking out Audie I found a story about actor Hugh O’Brian, the guy who played Wyatt Earp on TV, and at some point Hugh announced he was willing to bet $500 that he could draw a gun faster than anyone in Hollywood.

Audie said let’s make it $2,500 and use live ammunition.

Hugh declined.

Audie had PTSD and depression problems back when those weren’t considered real problems so they didn’t get treated and it turns out you can do a lot of heroic and violent stuff, but there’s a cost (John Wick’s therapist bill must be crushing) and it’s probably a bad idea to hold a live-ammunition gunfight with somebody who cares a lot less about living than you do, so good call Hugh O’Brian.

Now where were we?

Right, today my mom’s 98, but my dad died of a massive heart attack at 46.

BTW: I have no idea what constitutes a “massive” heart attack or how it differs from a “regulation-size” heart attack, but I gotta think if it kills you, it qualifies as “massive” even if three-out-of-two doctors disagree.

Anyway, split the difference between 46 and 98 and I’m scheduled to depart this veil of tears in just a few years.

I’ve mentioned this before, but for you late arrivers: tell your doctor your dad died of a heart attack at 46 and he or she will freak the fuck out and send you in for a heart scan and when they did that to me the results came back and I had zero plaque build-up in the four arteries that make your heart go thump in the night and the doctor expressed amazement and since I didn’t appear to dead he said I must take after my mother and then asked:

“Does she have some kind of special diet?”

To which I replied:

“I don’t know, is bacon a special diet?”

I’m sure diet and exercise and not being a drummer for Spinal Tap has something to do with longevity, but it seems like genetics – which we have no control over – is the Main Factor when it comes to living a long time and some author whose name I can’t remember (hey, I said my heart’s healthy, not my brain) once said:

“Old age is a privilege denied to many.” 

Since I always figured I’d kick the bucket early – if I took after my dad and got lucky, somewhere in my fifties – I now feel like I’m playing with house money and if I live as long as my mom I’ve got another three decades to go which sounds great, but if my mom is any example, the last decade-and-a-half are gonna suck and I’ll be a burden to my children, which now that I think about it sounds fair: I changed their diapers for years and I think it’s about time they change some of mine.

No Big Parties

Every year we go through the same comedy routine where my mom says she doesn’t want a Big Party and I say some version of:

“Who said anything about a Big Party? I spent quite a bit of money and time just to be here and asking for a Big Party on top of that, seems kinda pushy. If anything, you should hold a Big Party for me.”

I once threatened to hold a Big Party for the rest of us and not invite her and she said:

“Oh, that would be terrific.”

So last year I said how about I bring you absolutely any kind of cake you want and that will be your birthday celebration and after giving it some thought she said she wanted a cake that was “really elegant” but I’d have a hard time finding one because they’re so rare and I said what kind of cake are you talking about and she said:

“An Angel Food cake.”

So I visit the local grocery store and they’ve got dozens of Angel Food cakes in plastic containers stacked up like cordwood with Twelfth of Never expiration dates because you could drop an Angel Food cake off the Empire State Building and since they appear to be made out of rubber and have the consistency of an old sponge, the cake would bounce and the fall wouldn’t hurt it one bit.

So I buy one because they’re really cheap.

I then go over to the bakery – I think the Angel Food cakes were located in the Automotive Department because in a pinch you could use one for a spare tire – and buy the most expensive cake in the display case; a Carmen Miranda cake.

It was called a Carmen Miranda cake because it had fresh fruit on top and dripping off one side and if you don’t remember Carmen here’s a picture:

I figured my mom would remember Ms. Miranda and brought both cakes to her house and when she said the Carmen Miranda was the most exquisite cake she’d ever seen I said yeah, it’s pretty fancy-schmancy, but that cake’s for the rest of us and the Angel Food Dual-Radial is your cake.

Needless to say she totally ignored the Steel-Belted Angel Food cake and went after the Carmen Cake like a pit bull needing a sugar fix and a few days later I asked what happened to the cheap-ass Angel Food cake and she said;

“I don’t know, it’s around here somewhere.”

How Old Age sneaks up on you

Having a mother who is turning 98 and has a real shot at 100 and three brothers who are all eligible for Social Security and buying Just for Men hair dye in bulk will make you think about age and growing older and right now this minute, here’s what I think:

Old Age is like a distant relative who sends you a daily message that he’s coming for a nice long visit and because he keeps threatening to show up, but never appears (actually, he’s inching closer to your house every day, but because he’s creeping up on you, you don’t really notice) so after a while you ignore the Old Age I’m-On-My-Way messages and quit worrying about it.

Then one day your doorbell rings and there he is.

And it looks like he brought pretty much everything he owns including two steamer trunks full of clothes that were fashionable in the late 1970s, three bags of groceries for his special dietary needs, a wide array of age-related medicines for things like high blood-pressure and his “arthur-it-is” and a hearing aid and a walker and an Economy-Size package of adult diapers because he’s never sure if he’s about to pass gas or shit his pants and you realize now that Old Age has finally arrived, he plans on staying a while.

Like for the rest of your life.

So now what?

Two ways to go

Recently, me and my mom had a conversation and she talked about Old Age making you give up. You give up driving and give up travel and give up being independent and you see elderly people withdraw from Life because leaving the house is a titanic pain in the ass and not worth the effort.

That’s one way to go; start shutting down early.

Fuck that.

Maybe I’ll change my mind as my health deteriorates, but right now I’m thinking the end of the runway is in sight, so it’s pedal to the metal and if there’s anything I always wanted to do like get a bald eagle tattooed across my chest or sky dive naked or buy a motorcycle so big I can’t lift it back up if it ever falls over and drive that monster across America, now’s the time to do it.

When I was making videos with the Kansas City Royals I did a variety of Stupid Human Tricks like getting hit in the kidney by a 92 mile-an-hour slider, getting a Faux Hawk haircut with Eric Hosmer and while Jeff Francoeur supervised, chewing tobacco for five minutes to see if it would make me barf (it didn’t, but I would have felt way better if it had) and when Mitch Maier found out how old I was, he said no way.

I told Mitch he only thought I was young because I acted immature which I’m pretty sure I can keep up until I hit the end of the runway.

We’ll see.

Welsh poet Dylan Thomas wrote:

“Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

Which sounds like great advice until you find out Dylan died at 39 and while the rumor that he drank himself to death at New York’s White Horse Tavern seem to be exaggerated (he also had all kinds of respiratory problems) getting shit-faced (Dylan claimed he drank 18 straight whiskeys that night, the bartender disagreed) and taking on enough alcohol to kill a White Horse probably didn’t help his health situation.

On the other hand, dying young made Dylan a legend like it did for James Dean and if Jimmy lived long enough to host Celebrity Family Feud we probably wouldn’t find him so appealing.

In any case, while you’re waiting for the lights to go out it seems like you got two choices:

1. Sit in a room with a shawl over your knees, occasionally petting a cat who secretly hates you, surrounded by a variety of medications that you forget to take, reading Agatha Christie novels and watching Murder She Wrote reruns while someone occasionally brings you a cup of hot broth because your digestive system has been destroyed by one too many Meat Lover’s pizzas, or…

2. Let it rip.

After watching my mother turn 98 and getting a good look at where we all wind up if we live long enough, I’m gonna let it rip while I still can. So if you hear I died in some weird nude sky-diving incident don’t be surprised:

I warned you.