I imagine it was inevitable. It happens to everyone eventually.
Some handle it with grace. Others handle it with humor. Some stumble through it bumping into everything along the way. I’m still trying to figure out how I am handling it, because it seems, at least at this point in time, I am handling it firmly in the “all of the above” category.
I’m getting old.
I’m not elderly, mind you. I am firmly entrenched in the part of life called middle age. I am far from the twilight of my years. I’m told constantly that I still “have a lot of good years left in me.”
Oddly, I have said the same thing, albeit about my trusty, but very well-used and rapidly aging car. Unlike my car, most of my parts still work.
My wife told me the other day she thought I needed a hearing aid. I understood what she was saying, but I still have no idea what a hand grenade would do to the television volume.
I already have dentures and bifocals, so the hearing aid would simply complete the “old guy trifecta.”
I don’t think I need a hearing aid. I think I am developing what my grandfather used to call “selective hearing.” He heard what he wanted to hear and he never needed a device to help him do it.
I don’t move as rapidly or as fluidly as I used to. My joints make noises that form some sort of medical percussion that reminds me that the hip bone is connected to the leg bone and the leg bone is connected to the knee bone, and so on. I can still move, but so can a rusty boxcar — and we make the same sounds.
The transformation isn’t only physical. My memory has begun to dull. I don’t think it’s the onset of anything serious, but moreso the distance between the present and the time of the event actually happening is becoming greater.
Trying to remember the face of the girl who had the Peanuts lunch box 40 years ago is growing more difficult by the day. The upside is the things I wanted to forget throughout the years have faded as well. Things that were incredibly important when I was 16 don’t seem so important 30 years later.
I can say I am friends with people I have known for four decades. One of my children has a child of her own. My younger daughter is driving a car.
I find with each passing day I am evolving into my grandfather. I do things he did. I say things he said, the way he said them. I enjoy being a grandfather, though my grandson lives hundreds of miles away. I’d like to be the kind of grandfather mine was. There are John Wayne movies to be watched with the boy, cap guns to be shot and Grandpa/Grandson days to be had.
I’d like to think I would be giving my daughter a well-deserved break, but we grandfathers enjoy our grandsons as much as they enjoy us. It isn’t so much giving my daughter a break as it is giving this old man a treat. I don’t know if grandmothers feel the same way, but I’ll bet the mutual mischievous streak is unique to grandfathers and grandsons.
I read somewhere on the Internet that getting old was not for wusses. It isn’t really. It’s one of the more challenging things I have done. The funny thing is, it never goes away because we all grow older and not younger.
Years ago, Jimmy Buffett had a song that lauded the joys of growing older but not up. I think that might be the route I’ll take. No matter how old I may be according to the calendar, there is always a tire swing, ice cream cone or sand castle. Through the eyes of my grandson, there still is wonder and excitement.
I know in his brain, he wants to be a grownup. I know in mine, I’d trade it all to be 4, and Remington and I would have the time of our lives doing everything that 4-year-olds do before they get scolded by their parents.
There are imaginary mountains to climb, imaginary seas to sail. We can be cowboys and explorers, brave soldiers, sailors and airmen. We can climb Mount Everest and we can take a spacecraft to the moon and back.
The reality of it all is I am old. I went to the moon and back in my mind many years ago. I was a cowboy and a detective and a soldier in the wilds of my backyard. For me, those days have passed. My career has taken me in other directions than the ones I thought I would travel as a child.
Through the eyes and imagination of a boy just getting started on his journey, I am blessed with the opportunity to do it all again. We find as we get older, adult responsibilities take up our time and consume us before we realize it. We complain that we need a vacation, some time away. Perhaps just a quick weekend away from the hassles and aggravation of real life.
“Will you play with me, Grandpa?”
For a moment, getting old doesn’t seem so bad. Creaky joints magically go away. A sore back is suddenly healed. Vision and hearing are as sharp as they ever have been.
There’s a little boy, with his hand out, offering to take you on a trip to the moon.
Baltimore native Joe Weaver is a husband, father, pawnbroker and gun collector. From his home in New Bern, he writes on the lighter side of family life.