Can’t Comprehend Getting Old

When I was a teenager, there were two things I could not comprehend. (Well, actually there were about a billion things I could not, and still cannot, comprehend. But for now I’m just focusing on two particular items.)

When I was young, I could not comprehend that my parents, or any of my middle-aged relatives, were once young. They would show me a black-and-white photo of, say, my Uncle Mickey in uniform during World War II, and I would exclaim, “Nah, that sort of looks like him, but he was never skinny and young. Can’t be him.” Or they’d show me a photo of my father when he was in elementary school, and it would make my head spin. That can’t be my dad, I reasoned, because surely when he was born, he was already age 40 and had five kids and had perfected “The Look™,” that penetrating glare that caused all our muscles to freeze as we were consumed by guilt — and always appropriate guilt, because he somehow instinctively knew when we were up to no good.

If I thought about it logically back then, I would have acknowledged that all people were born as infants, then grew into youngsters, then teens, then adults, then middle-agers, and then, finally, geezers. It’s just that my brain couldn’t quite fathom the possibility that any of my older relatives actually went through that process. My being unable to comprehend that middle-aged people were once young was a bit odd, but not really debilitating. It simply caused my relatives to shake their heads and say, “Just goes to show that someone can get decent grades in school and still have no more common sense than a turnip.”

However, the other thing I could not comprehend as a young person has proven to be a significant problem. Back when I was in my teens and 20s, I could not for the life of me envision that I would ever become old. Again, if I looked at it logically, I would have understood that people do not remain young forever. But I couldn’t grasp the idea that it would ever happened to me. It was just some kind of weird mental block.

During the past four decades various people have told me — once or twice or a million times — that I need to put money into a pension account for my retirement. I understood what a pension was, and I understood what retirement was (it’s what my parents and aunts and uncles did), and I even could do the math and calculate how much money over how many years needed to be socked away to achieve the desired result at retirement age. But I kept putting it off because deep down I really didn’t think it applied to me.

Then one day when I was 34 years old, I went to bed. The very next morning I woke up and discovered I was 58. Holy moly, how did that happen? 

So here I am: half my hair has turned gray, and the other half has turned loose. My prostate is the size of grapefruit. My most frequent comment these days is, “Huh? Whudja say?” And I make sure we leave events early so I can drive home during daylight hours, because once the sun goes down I turn into Stevie Wonder behind the wheel. Somehow, the unfathomable happened. Despite a prodigious amount of denial on my part, the incomprehensible nonetheless occurred: I stopped being young, and now I’m on the threshold of full-fledged geezerhood. And my pension fund will allow me to retire comfortably — for exactly 7-1/2 months. I wish someone had warned me.