Age Spot

I think it's hardly surprising that "age" is something we tend to discuss more and more as we get older. Or more specifically, that the "problems" of age are something that we tend to discuss more and more as we get older.

I was in the Doctor's office the other day and was reading a print-out which they had pinned to the wall. I can't remember the exact title - because no prisoners were left when my memory was sieged - but it was a series of quotes about age by the late George Carlin, which basically illustrated the cyclical nature of the whole process.

Without going into great detail, Carlin surmised that the young think of age as a "goal" to "achieve". The middle-aged think of age as something to "conquer" or to "overcome". And the elderly think of age as ... well, actually ... the elderly DON'T think of age as anything much at all. They're past it. They don't care anymore.
To sum it up, in the grand old circle of life, we go out as we come in - wrinkled, screaming and in need of a diaper change.

So over the weekend I spent some time on my couch thinking about the "problems" of age and wondering where I would fit in to Mr. Carlin's continuum. It was a cozy endeavor because my son chose to spend the better part of his Saturday morning on the couch next to me, playing with my hands - conducting an engaging scientific study of his own.

My first order of business was to remove myself swiftly from the "elderly" category because, after all, I still have my own teeth, my comfortable underwear have not yet risen to the level where they may as well be sewn to my bra and I'm not at the point where funerals have become my only social event that I attend with any regularity.

But immediately after comforting myself with these reassuring thoughts, I felt the distinct discomfort of a piercing "nip" coming from the left side of my body.
It was this "nip" that set my mind racing as it dawned on me that the very same "game" that my son was playing with my hand today, was the very same game that he had been playing with his "elderly" Grandad's hand a few weeks earlier.

To sum it up in brief... his strategy is to take his small, soft fingers and pull up the skin on the back of your hand, in a tent-like fashion, as far as he possibly can without ripping it from the bone. Then, just before it hits the point of no return - where the elasticity has been stretched to capacity and you can feel your neck smoothing out in a compensatory maneuver, he lets go at the speed of light and counts how long it takes until your mutilated membrane relaxes back to "normal". The object of the game is to count how many seconds it takes for the adjustment process - with the outcome suggesting that the longer it takes, the older you are.

Fabulous.

I watched in horror as my stubborn skin sank back into place with the speed of a ninety year old behind the wheel of a Buick on a sunny Sunday in July.
Then I screamed in horror as my son informed me that my skin had actually taken longer to circle its orbit and land safely back at base than my "elderly" father's skin. And he'd worked in construction all his life - with cement and bricks and wood and dust ...

How could this be?
It was not making sense.

For days now I have been in a haze of distressed disbelief as I try to come to terms with the repulsive, cyclopean pustule that has decided to grace the tip of my nose like a winking, inflated eye-ball - announcing my arrival to events at least five minutes before the rest of me shows up.
For days I have been trying to work out how a forty-year-old Mom with peri-menopausal hot flashes, gravity-stricken boobs and a slowly shriveling vagina can be seriously shopping for acne medication.

And now this!

How can I be a greasy ball of walking hormones AND be a dried up canvas for liver spots all at the same time?
It just doesn't add up.

I sat for an hour or so longer trying to work it all out when it dawned on me that some questions are not really meant to be answered. And even if we try, no two people will come to the exact same conclusion in the exact same way.


So rather than finish with my own unanswerable question, I thought I'd finish with one from Steven Wright. His are much better than mine and deserve more thought.
He asked:

"How young can you die of old age?"


Something to think about ...

L.