"The Golden Years..."

What’s so wonderful about those Golden Years?

Most of my friends are so invested in protecting or curing their internal parts and talking about them that it seems to leave very little time for what? Living?

I was out gambling with a friend who doesn’t gamble last week and who spent his time telling me about his last half dozen operations, that the nice man sitting across from us popped up and came over to us saying, “you know, before I heard your conversation, I was really feeling good about myself. Now, I am going to drink myself into oblivion” and off he marched. The Golden Years redux….

There’s so much however that they never tell you in the rule books. You know, they’ve got all of these books for babies and young people, but where do they tell seniors how to behave or act or what to look forward to? I’ve never seen one….and let me tell you, half the time we’re adrift just trying to figure it all out before
God says, “that’s enough!...Time’s up!”

I have discovered too what occupies all that newfound leisure time: It’s called looking for things…

Most people in their twilight years, spend countless hours looking for the things that are right under their noses or putting up with people who ask ‘where did you have them last?’ which drives most people to distraction. If you knew where you had them last, why the heck would be looking all over for them?

Into this category the worst two defenders seem to be glasses and keys of which I am blessed with one pair of glasses and about three sets of keys in case I happen to lose one. There is absolutely no hope for someone who loses all three sets which has happened to me on occasion if you can twist my arm to admit it…

What’s worse out of frustration, one party tends to blame the other. “Did you move my keys?” which is usually followed up with, “Dag nab it, woman, why in God’s name would I want to move your keys?”

Typically, if history is any yardstick, it doesn’t end there and can lead to a bloody feud that is either settled by finding the keys and then all is forgiven or the police coming to the door armed with Mace for unruly seniors and bullet proof vests.

You see, we are an unruly group… More and more of us, are also taking to the highways on our Harleys eventually becoming road kill because we couldn’t find our corrective lens or we forgot where we were and where we are going…

I don’t mean to paint a bleak picture. After all, grand-children think we are the greatest thing since sliced bread, parents pay tribute because they’re hoping that we’ll watch the kids when they want to scamper off to Bermuda or are still hopeful that we are going to leave them something after the medical bills are paid.

But in truth, the Golden Years aren’t really all they’re cracked up to be and in some respects are kind of a sick payback for those of us who make it. For example, when you can finally afford a good corned beef sandwich, you can no longer chew it.
Or if you finally afford that big cruise you’ve been promising yourself for thelast forty years, you discover that you get real queasy onboard and are subject to headaches that last two weeks. To add insult to injury, you also get put next to some kind of politically correct imbecile that calls you on your every mannerism or utterance and you begin to think the brig looks good compared to putting up with the company of these idiots for the rest of the cruise…

Bring back those glory days!

Were there really any glory days? I’m not sure. It seems I was always working hard to grow up or be something….or pay the bill….or send the kid to school….or take care of the aunt or my mother-in-law, a thankless task if there ever was one.

I mean she’s 95 and going strong, has all of her marbles, walks like a spring chicken and then proceeds to tell us she wishes she were dead! (Why didn’t she tell me that before we invested in the medical bed, the crutches, the special TV, the medicines and the Assisted Living?)

Why? Because the world doesn’t know the troubles she’s had…. What troubles?, I ask, since I know that her husband gave her a comfortable life, built a nice home, and took away all of her burdens. She retired young after not really working her entire life, went to Florida, went on cruises and bake-outs and did not worry about a thing that anyone can remember—including her children. Now, she’s back and she had to be put in a nursing home because she acts like a petulant little child who won’t eat or take her medicine unless she can stretch your insides first and give you apoplexy.

Now, she loves to point out how many of her roommates have died while she trudges on. I wonder if I should suggest to her that there may be a cause and effect relationship here!
She still misses the child that never shows up!

So here we are charged with nurse-maid duties and a haughty, superior dog who doesn’t like to be ignored and is very needy. Although Brutus’ full time occupation is chasing the critters who inhabit his body and refuse to be vacated, he is perennially hungry, and needful of evacuating simultaneously so between mom and the thing with the tail that some of our guests call a dog, there is little peace or pleasure in having too much leisure time. In fact, it’s a curse.

To tell the truth, I’d rather be working. The folks who take this retirement stuff seriously are for the most part disengaged from what’s happening and belief that the true measure of what you are is determined by Bunko. I still don’t know what this game entails exactly except it involves a lot of emotional jumping between card tables and some professed anxiety.

I used to play poker. But down in my retirement place, it seems that they’re not used to a two fisted, cigar smoking, cursing, New Yorker who is possessed of a million ways of saying that “you are an idiot!” and there’s not too many with our particular brand of humor which kind of between insulting or sarcastic or both who wouldn’t get tossed out after two or three episodes without an apology…. Nor do they gather the kind of snacks we hard drinking, hard living types find essential to maintaining our normally hyperactive psyches. So, although retirement is kind of nice in a distant abstract way, it’s also kind of like being in a place between Heaven and Hell. It’s pretty but it lacks content, my editor might say. A kind of intellectual limbo-like landscape full of empty attractions and boring pleasures….

I would feel a lot better off hanging out with the New York Times or the Realist down by my existential coffee shop, the real thing with ripped leather cushions and dirty windows not some upscale Starbucks full of people who get off speaking in Grande latte codes in some secretive sharing way that shows how much better they are than we…

And if that doesn’t do it, Nature tends to bust one with great humor. My lawn tends to be either dying or growing a foot at a time. I have worn out three lawnmowers and I can’t afford to risk the wraith of my wife or the disdainful look of my neighbors that seems to suggest, “Poor Les; can’t keep up with the grass….the weeds are taking over; closer and closer he gets to Assisted Living…” Damn, I am not going down without a fight. I will never allow my heretical self to be handled like a dish towel, folded and stuck in a bed when I want to my lying on the untended grass staring at the stars above…
No, that’s not for me. When I stop making my own decisions, I am going to dig my own hole, put up an antennae, get a beach chair and just hang out til the Ole Man up above calls out…. There’s no way that I’m going to go off without a fight and who gives a hoot what my Medicare administrator says….

Les Aaron
Contrarian for Life
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www.lesaaron.blogspot.com





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