 As I was getting
my hair cut recently I looked down at the tufts of silver hair on the barber's
bib and thought in disgust, "They could have shaken that old man's hair off
before they put this thing on me."
Then I saw the
hair falling from my own head matching the scorned tufts. So this was it. The
beginning of the end.
I thought about
having to get brown hair coloring, like the guy on the Grecian Formula
commercial, who after dying his hair kept an unsmiling picture of himself with
gray hair on the mantle for comparison purposes. Where was I going to get a
picture like that? Did I have to get a mantle, too, or was it all right to put
the picture on an end table? And how gradual was the hair re-browning process?
Would my entire head turn an unnatural, Ronald Reagan copper-brown, and look
like I was wearing some dimestore wig.
This past Friday
I turned 38, and this and other concerns about aging have been bothering me.
I've been having various troubles. I lost my right contact lens-the superpowered
one-in Lake Michigan during my vacation. Driving home from the lake, my wife
Barbara, as a vision test, asked me how many people were crossing in the
sidewalk ten feet in front of four car. I said two, which was right, but I had
no idea what sex they were. This with partial correction! If I hadn't had the
one contact lens in I certainly wouldn't have known the number, and only
guessed they were humans through their general shapes and that they were moving
under their own power.
Even with both
my lenses in I've mistaken tree stumps and rocks for dogs and squirrels. I've
said, "Hi, boy" to tree stumps with corrected vision. You think this is going
to improve as I get older? I don't. I'm going to be walking into parked cars
and wet cement and falling down hills.
I've got a
tattered colon, too. I have to take four pills a day for it. It's not like I
can skip a few, because then I can feel the colon acting up. I hear it groan.
Do you think that's pleasant? It's not pleasant to go to a party either, and have
a doctor you know tell you you should just have the colon taken out right away,
because sooner or later you'll have to anyway. That was by far my worst party,
when a doctor told me to have my colon removed. Later I went to my own doctor
and told him what the other guy said, and he winced and said, "Not
necessarily." And then he asked, "He told you that at a party? But that's the
kind of stuff that happens when you age, I guess.
You say, "Well,
even with your gray hair and lousy colon and terrible eyesight you have an
I.R.A. to fall back on when you get old." Wrong. that's another concern I've
got. I have no money for my retirement, or anything else for that matter. I've
been using my money to live on, not socking it away. Are little things like
buying books and CDs and not packing my lunch going to cost me in the end? What
a terrible thing, to be living in a smelly shelter in your last years and know
that you're there just because you went out to lunch too much in the '90s. They
say Social Security is running out of dough, too. That's nice. I'll be living
in a single room with a cot and a hot plate and a can of My-Tee-Fine baked
beans for company. I'll be lurching around drunk and hollering somewhere with
my pants falling down.
The way I figure
it, if I take this somewhat negative view of the future now, it will make aging
easier on me. I'll be so used to the idea of having no money or colon and being
blind as a bat it won't seem so bad when it comes to pass. And if I end up with
a little money and my colon and eyesight intact, imagine how relieved I'll be.
You just have to know how to think about things.
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Quirkee Voices 
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