HOW OLD ARE YOU?

Can you remember a time when you weren't old enough to do something, like buy tiobacco or beer at the store?  Maybe you're still there and don't know it.  There's always an age you must attain before you can do something, or at least it seems that way.  I never thought I'd look forward to being old enough to draw social security, but I did.  Now I'm a little confused about how old I must be to consider myself a senior citizen.  When will I officially become elderly?  I'm not sure, but maybe I'm already there.  I shouldn't worry about any official cutoffs or qualifications or anything like that.  It's the unofficial things that should worry me, and some of them do.

I saw a shopping cart in the parking lot at Walmart  yesterday and started pushing it toward the entrance.  Then I heard a voice behind me say, "Too late.  Some old man took it."  I turned and saw a woman in her sixties standing there.  Sixty and she's calling me old?  I took the cart back to her, and she thanked me.  My wife grinned.  She's in her sixties too, and she also thinks I'm old.  I push shopping carts around even when I don't need one because they act as a crutch for me.  My right leg gives me fits these days, so I limp badly.  I've had a limp for a long time, since I was a kid actually.  Broke a leg that left me slightly gimpy, but it got worse as I got older.  I don't think much about it, but I see people staring at me, and I feel like telling them, "It's an old injury; it's not age."

You are as old as you feel, so goes the old saying, but that's wrong.  You are as old as the calendar says you are.  I was born in 1941, and nothing changes that.  But how you live sure determines how you feel when you get old.  My active and reckless lifestyle left me with some infirmities that got worse with age, but at the same time, it left me with a strong body and constitution for an old fart.  All those years of working out, walking, hiking, working at hard jobs from time to time . . . that paid off.   Doctors tell me I'm in decent shape, except I need to get a hip fixed.  Some things wear out with age, and there's not much you can do about that except deal with it when it comes.  And you deal with the things that slow you down some . . . and go on.  Don't give in.  Douglas McArthur said something to the effect that age wrinkles the body, but quitting wrinkles the soul.  Good advice.