Booty Dish Syndicate Dude Week: Guest Blogger Gary
Gary writes for One Sweet Dream. We've been blog friends since I started Beauty Dish, and if it wasn't for some of the kind things he said when I first started, I would have quit, no question. Please visit Gary's blog after you read his piece. He has a lot going on in "real life" at the moment so he doesn't get to update often. But when he does, it's worth it!
Observations on Aging
It was my second year of college, so I was 20 years old, walking down the street. Coming towards me on the sidewalk ahead were two young boys of perhaps nine or ten. They were horsing around, oblivious, shoving each other and laughing.
Suddenly one of them straightened up and said, "Here comes a man."
I turned around to look for the man - but no one was there.
Last December I went for my annual physical. I like my doctor. He's a triathlon competitor, so he tends to look at his patient's bodies as machines in various states of efficiency, and works to optimize them. He asked me questions about the nature of my physical activity (I run); how much (about 15 miles a week); and where (our local state park, which includes numerous steep, rocky trails). He suggested that I vary my running pattern to include some shorter, faster routes, and a day where I do a much longer, slower run. I no longer consider myself an "athlete," but it's nice to have that orientation from my doctor.
That was the extent of the physical. No ongoing problems, just a general good state of healthiness.
That was the case for my wife's parents, too, when I first met them twenty years ago; now they're 87 and 91. For the past nine years they have been living with us from December through April, and it's been interesting to observe them as they've needed more and more care (even as our son has gone from 5 to 14 and required decreasing care). While they are certainly aware of the physical costs of aging, there doesn't seem to be a lot of awareness of the emotional element - or at least none they care to articulate. What does it feel like to be 87?
I could be wrong, but it seems to me that the Baby Boomer generation is the first to really acknowledge its own aging as an ISSUE. And given that there's a shitload of us about to hit the health care system, it better be.
We worry about aging, we examine it, we do everything thing we can to put it off or even avert it. We didn't invent face lifts, but we certainly made it an industry. We color the gray out of our hair, iron out wrinkles, tighten sags and constantly examine ourselves in the mirror. Men are obsessed with the quantity of hair on their head. We might have qualms about cloning, but we're all fascinated by the idea.
Our parents worry about how they appear to others; our concern is how we appear to ourselves.
The Boomers pretty much invented the Health Club and exercise as a casual - but important - activity. Before the Boomers, "working out" meant doing long division. Maybe they can't prolong youth, but they may be able to slow down the process of aging - or at least make it more enjoyable.
I tried to convince my mother-in-law that her problem with balance might be helped if she used one of those hip walking sticks that look like ski poles. Nope. It looks too much like a cane, which might make other people think she's helpless. To her, a cane represents the outward appearance of aging - frailty. There's almost no overt acknowledgment of the very real fact of frailty.
With each passing year their bodies do grow more frail, their steps more tentative. It's satisfying and deeply moving for us, their children, to become their parents and give them the same care they gave us when we were helpless.
The unsettling thing is that the gradual and growing failure of the body seems to be accompanied by a growing frailty of the mind. My in-laws can share detailed memories from forty years ago, but the ability to access short-term memory seems to be fading fast. Sentences trail away into non-sequitors, and we do our best to try to guess the meaning of what they were going for and fill it in for them.
My wife and I witness this every day, and think about it and talk about it. In just a few years, that's us. Will we be the same to our son? What can we do now to make it better? Does one's mind gradually become less tidy and we are not even aware of it? I'd like to ask Grandma and Grandpa, but they just can't go there.
That's scary to me. I value my awareness above all else.
But what is it that makes the post-1950s generations care about these things? We think and talk, read and write, about such things as awareness and the nature of life in ways our parents, for the most part, could not and cannot.
Back when I was twenty and those boys thought they saw a man, I was surprised at the idea of myself as a man. My own self-image was as the kid who just got out of high school.
I'm 58. My body doesn't perform as efficiently as it did ten or 20 years ago, and when I do notice myself in the mirror I'm always a little surprised. And my wife finds it amusing when someone addresses me as "Sir." But in my mind, I'm still that twenty-year-old wondering where the man is.
4:58:20 AM 
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