Old Borneo

While looking at the embarrassment of riches that is Friday Fish Fry venues in Wisconsin during Lent (all Wisconsinites, including UU me, are mildly Catholic around now) I came upon this warning.

No Bingo on Good Friday.

I apologize to the serious Catholics, but it was my first out loud laugh of that day. 

Now that I’m apparently old, I appreciate how random are the joys in which we can no longer participate. Like bingo with caveats, we are in the Variable Season of our lives. 

I can no longer eat buttered popcorn with reckless abandon. Nor is it wise to eat a whole bunch of any high fat food because I no longer have my gall bladder of yore. I still have it, but it and I have our little bargains. 

I can eat a little gluten but not a lot. I will still eat an orange croissant from the Ashland (WI) Bakery, but if I make cookies, we are not going over about two of an evening. 

My husband can eat almost anything but gone are the days of recklessly dry Cab Sav or mugs of IPA or slow all-day carafes of caffeinated (aka real) coffee.

Both of us can still get down on the floor and then back up but, well, no Olympians are asking for our routine.

I know folks who can’t eat ice cream, tomatoes, and even certain teas give them sore throats and small hives. People who have become allergic to their pets. People who are always cold now. Or never cold now. People (me) surprised how white daylight is after cataract surgery. People (me again) looking at their saggy chins and baggy cheeks and wondering if anything could be done with clothespins. 

I’m not talking about people who had allergies as children or who have faced physical challenges all their lives. I’m talking about how the shape and taste of the world simply changes as we age. When I was young, I clambered up hills and cliffs, dunes and ladders. But what was a challenge then has become a yellow and black striped caution tape telling me to back off and go home.

This week I had my third physical therapy appointment to learn specific exercises to try to re-densify my dear old bones. For the past month I’ve been carefully doing these exercises three times a week. I’m nearly always a bit sore the next day, but a bit sore is better than a broken hip so I do them. And then, just this week after an hour long hike one day and four hours of slinging crates of donated foods at my food pantry gig, I realized I was sore but not as sore as I used to get. Which is about as wildly young as I can manage these days. 

“How are you?” 

“Oh, thank you for asking. I’ve ached worse than this.”

But here’s the surprise to me. I am able to do, eat, carry, and move less now that when I was younger. But I swear, I am loving it all even more. 

I don’t think I ever loved too many cookies as much as I love just one. These days Len takes one swallow of my late afternoon wine and then we both laugh when he dramatically sighs as if he is a camel driver just in from the Sahara. I’ve watch old friends laugh so hard getting into or out of boats that everyone in the area starts laughing, too. 

When you can’t climb the tree anymore so you hug it and ask what’s new, is that a loss? Nah. 

When all clothes are uncomfortable except t-shirts and well-worn jeans, well, isn’t this where we started our adult lives? 

I slipped on ice hiding under snow on the sidewalk when walking our daughter’s dog last week. Nothing broke. (I keep telling the PT she should advise older people to gain weight because padding helps.) The dog was concerned and licked my face creating an extremely sweet moment. Dog kisses AND I’d never seen my neighborhood from that angle before. I got back up on all four, still nose to nose with the dog, then stood all the way up and looked around. Shook my ankles, shook my arms, thought about going right back home because I’M OLD and I FELL! 

But nothing hurt so we didn’t go home. We kept walking through our early Sunday morning neighborhood. Admired old houses sugar dusted with new snow. Listened to the storybook chug of the freight train in the distance. Sniffed the coffee when I got back home. 

There’s plenty that’s rough, hard, and sad at this end of a life. But there’s plenty that is new, interesting, and meaningfully challenging. It’s like visiting Borneo without leaving town.