Unwelcome Reminders
I took a printout of my bank account transactions from our Italian vacation to Starbucks today to sort out my checking account. As I left the coffee shop there was a man exiting directly behind me. I walked out first and held the door open for him. We walked into the parking lot side-by-side but without speaking. He quickened his pace and was soon a few steps ahead of me. The parking lot was noisy as the traffic from a four-lane city road flowed freely on one side. Suddenly, the man stopped and turned his head. Then he spoke to me. “You dropped your pen.” I looked back and saw my pen on the ground. I never heard it fall. But this guy did and he was a good four feet in front of me. At this point I noticed that he was younger than me; he was probably in his early thirties.
We age subtly and the signs of aging are subtle as well. But the stark realizations – the unwelcome reminders of aging – are about as subtle as a tall person navigating a low clearance in the dark of night. For the past several years my eyesight has been deteriorating ever so slowly. I didn’t give it much thought until one night a few months ago while reading in bed when I noticed that I was holding my book out at a full arm’s length. Everything was all right as long as I could keep extending my arm out a little at a time, but when my elbows locked, so did my ability to focus. “Damn,” I remember realizing, “I need reading glasses.”
Now, today, here was another reminder. I don’t hear as well as I used to. This should not have come as a surprise to me. The many, many, MANY rock concerts of my youth have certainly had an effect on my hearing. Hell, I stood in front of a tall bank of speakers at a Deep Purple concert in the 1970s when the band was in the Guinness Book of Records as the loudest rock band in the world. My ears rang for three days after that show.
My hearing is just fine – at least for a man of my age. I am nowhere near the age where my children are obliged to chastise me to turn up my hearing aid so I stop saying “huh?” to everything that is said at Thanksgiving dinner. We’re talking about one or two kilohertz off the top of the hearing scale. No biggy. I can just do without the reminders like the one in the parking lot today.
To paraphrase a popular expression: If a tree falls in a forest and only an aging baby boomer who went to too many concerts as a teen-ager is there to hear it, does it make a noise? Well, yeah, it does. But a pen falling in a Starbucks parking lot? I don’t want to talk about it.
10:11:15 PM  Stories
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