What to expect when you reach old age

Somehow, through the miracle of continuing to wake up each morning (an event that has become more surprising over the decades) I have gotten old…or at least older, which as any older person will tell you beats the alternative.

When one of my brothers asked my 96-year-old mother, “Who wants to be 100 years old anyway?” she said: “A 99-year-old.”

(She’s still funny, although you have to wait longer for the punchlines.)

Anyway…

For those of you who aren’t officially old yet, I’ve written this essay so you’ll know what to expect, although it’s almost certain once you actually get old you’ll forget you ever read this and we might as well start there.

Memory

You will have vivid memories of things that happened when you were in third grade, but absolutely no idea where you left your garage door opener, an event that took place 15 minutes ago.  

For instance: Mrs. Moody (who taught band at Rocklin Elementary) gave me a baritone saxophone to play and told me I had the perfect baritone saxophone “embouchure” (the way in which a player applies the mouth to the mouthpiece of a brass or wind instrument) and she asked if I knew what that meant and I said:

“You’re telling me I have a big mouth?”

I can remember that like it happened yesterday, but am currently unable to go to the bank because I can’t get my garage door open.

On the plus side: if there are books and movies and TV shows you enjoyed in the past, go back and watch or read them again because you won’t remember any of it (I’m currently re-watching Curb Your Enthusiasm) and it’s just like you’re seeing it for the first time.

You can also weaponize a bad memory and claim to forget stuff you never wanted to remember in the first place, so make sure to take advantage of that and next time your spouse bitches at you about something you forgot to do, just say: “Have we met?”

Hair

Q. What’s the best thing about gray hair?

A. It’s hair.

Think of your body as an overloaded airplane trying to clear a mountain peak, so you start throwing stuff out the airplane door to lighten your load. Apparently, whomever is in charge of my body (and I’m 100 percent certain it’s not me) has decided hair coloring is unnecessary and if I’m going to clear that mountain peak of Old Age, the energy that was applied to keeping my hair brown has been redirected to keeping my heart beating.

And if those are the alternatives, I’ve got no complaints.

BTW: I have a hard time believing in an All-Knowing Supreme Being who would have the hair stop growing on top of your head at the same it starts growing out your ears. That’s bad planning in anybody’s book.

Hearing

So once I got interested in playing baseball as an adult – or as close as I can come to that designation – I called up George Brett (I knew him a little bit) and asked if I could ever take batting practice with him and he said yes and invited me out to Kauffman Stadium during the off-season.

Turned out, during the winter the Royals made the stadium available to professional ballplayers that lived in the area and they all hit two times a week, but George wanted to hit three times a week which I gotta think is one of the reasons he was George Brett and they weren’t.

So I took the day off from work and we hit together and afterwards George asked if I was available the next week as well and being a moron I said no; I couldn’t hang out and hit baseballs, I had a job.

Then I started thinking about it and thought if Ted Williams asked my dad to hang out and my dad said no, he had other shit to do, that would make my dad a moron as well, so I called George up and said I was in and started taking days off to hit with the Future Hall of Famer.

It took me a while to figure out why George wanted to hit with me; the pitching machine would get stuck and he needed me down at the far end of the batting cage to unstick the pitching machine so he could hit without interruption. Which was kind of like being stranded in a cabin in the Arctic Circle and finding out your companion, the young Brigitte Bardot (I have a well-developed imagination) only wants to have sex with you to stay warm and in either George or Brigitte’s case I’d say fine; whatever the reason I’m just glad to be included in the proposed activity.

BTW: Brigitte just turned 87 which is probably why she came to mind and if she ever invited me to do the Arctic Circle Sex Thing I’d probably say yes even now because let’s face it…she’s Brigitte Bardot and when I told the story I’d leave out the fact that when we had sex she had one foot in the grave and the other one on a roller skate.  

Also, at her age she probably wouldn’t remember it, so I could tell any story I want and get away with it.

And the point of all this is:

The batting cage was right next to a concrete wall and if you’ve never heard the sound of a wooden bat hitting a baseball while inside, it sounds just like a gunshot and after we hit a few hundred baseballs, the ear closest to the concrete wall would ring and that was back in 1992 and it hasn’t stopped ringing since.

So I have tinnitus in my left ear and maybe it’s just old age, but I like the George Brett story way better and will continue to blame my hearing problems on that and here’s how that matters to the rest of you:

I WILL NEVER, EVER, NEVER WEAR A HEARING AID AND IF YOU BURST A LUNG TRYING TO COMMUNICATE WITH ME, I CAN LIVE WITH THAT.

Face it; there aren’t that many people I want to listen to anyway.

Vision

Your body gets up to all kinds of Old Age Hijinks, probably because we were designed to live to a ripe old age of 42 and then get eaten by a bear or die from whooping cough and because we insist on living twice as long as necessary, the warranty has run out on our bodily functions and one of them is vision.

I’ve been near-sighted most of my life, but for some reason I now have 20-20 vision, but would need the arms of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to hold a menu far enough away from my eyes to read it.

Also, menu designers think it’s funny to do stuff like combine gray type with purple paper and then make the print so small you’d think you were reading the fine print on a Donald Trump prenuptial agreement and restaurants get in on the act by making sure their establishments are so dim you’d need a miner’s helmet to find your way to the Men’s Room.

Weight gain

As always, I’m glad to bring some inside baseball knowledge to baseball fans and once a player gets older and starts wearing a permanent spare tire while trying to hit a baseball, I’ve heard it described as “working around the boiler.”

And the boiler doesn’t run as hot as it used to so it doesn’t need as many calories to feed it, which is dicked up because as you get older the list of stuff you can’t do gets increasingly long and one of the few things you can still do is enjoy good food, but the Poor-Planning Almighty has taken that pleasure away from us.

While waiting for a spring training practice to begin, the Kansas City Royals trainers tried to explain how weight gain or loss was really simple; if you burned more calories than you consumed you lost weight, if you consumed more calories than you burned you gained weight.

A theory I insisted could not be right because it would require me to change my lifestyle because I’m currently burning so few calories I could just look at a bag of Double-Stuf Oreos and take on enough calories to hibernate for the winter.

Flexibility

When I first arrived in Kansas City to work for the Star my assigned parking place was in an employee lot which was surrounded by iron poles with a steel cable strung in-between and since the cable was about waist high I initially jumped over it and after a few years I started ducking under it and after a few more years I started walking around it.

As you get older you lose flexibility and that’s why old dudes like slip-on shoes because once you put them on you’re done for the day and don’t have to worry about bending all the way over (and each year that’s a longer trip) to tie your shoelaces.

When a young person sees some coins lying on the ground they assume someone dropped them without noticing and in reality it was probably an old person, who was well-aware they dropped the coins, looked down and said:

“Fuck it, I’m not bending all the way over for 27 cents.”

Old-joke alert

OK, so that last bit reminded me of a joke told by comedian Jackie Vernon (hey, I warned you about random memories) and it went like this:

Two guys are using a two-hole outhouse (c’mon, go along with the premise) and one guy finishes and stands up and a quarter falls out of his pocket and down the hole and after thinking about it for a minute, he takes out a hundred dollar bill and throws that down the hole as well and the other guys says: “Why did you do that?”

And the first guy says: “You think I’m going down there for a quarter?”

(And that’s what passed for entertainment before the invention of on-line pornography.)

Summary

OK, the laptop gremlins that count how many words I’ve written are telling me it’s time to wind things up and I haven’t even mentioned dry skin, joint pain or the fact that you’ll never sleep eight hours in a row again because your prostate is the size of a beach ball and you’ll need to get up at least three times a night to urinate, which once again calls into question the design flaws in the human body.

I mean, what kind of system is it that has me wide awake at 3 AM and struggling to keep my eyes open like I just visited an opium den at 3 PM?

Also, I haven’t said a single word about the unique problems women face as they get older and that’s because I’m unqualified and it would largely be guesswork and I’ve got enough problems with the opposite sex as it is.

Anyway…

As someone once said, getting old isn’t for sissies and as someone else once said: it beats the alternative.

And if you’re thinking, “Wait…didn’t he already use that joke at the beginning?” don’t blame me because I have no memory of that. (See? I told you it was possible to weaponize a bad memory.)

Now good luck with all that old-age stuff; you’re going to need it.