The Forty Year Old …

… In My Head

I have written before about this guy, the forty year old that lives (rent free, by the way) in my head.   I assume he arrived with my fortieth birthday, decided he liked the place and stayed.  He is my Portrait of Dorian Gray … he doesn’t age, nor does he let any older guys move in.   Like most forty year olds, he is a confident fellow, truthfully, a little arrogant.   He is, after all, forty.   I don’t think I noticed him until I was in my fifties and I was starting to feel my age a bit.   As I’d approached a task that would have been a snap at forty but seemed a bit of a reach at fifty, I’d hear him:  C’mon, you can do it.  You’re still young.  Most times he was right but as I got older, he had to yell louder, maybe even tweak my adrenals to give me a spike of adrenaline.  By the time I was sixty-five, he’d given up on persuasion and resorted to hijacking the controls of this old brain.   So, off I’d charge like a forty-year old in a sixty-five year old body.

Advertisements

Beautiful

One the joys of being a music lover is finding an old song that was once a favorite and hearing it again with Older Ears.   Today I rediscovered Gordon Lightfoot’s ballad, Beautiful, while I was going through my old CD collection. This lovely song appeared first on the album Don Quixote and features gorgeous guitar playing and some of Lightfoot’s most romantic lyrics.   It makes this old heart smile …

Throwback Thursday – The Negotiator

This is a post from 10 years ago and includes one of my favorite stories about my oldest grandson, Reed.

I grew up in the middle-class suburban town of East Haven, Connecticut. The first home I remember was an apartment in a converted Army barracks but when I was in third grade, we moved to a small ranch style house in East Haven where my father lived until he went into assisted living eight years ago. We would probably have been classified as a lower middle class family but I don’t remember lacking for anything, at least until high school, and even then the the things I wanted were more wishes than needs.  One was clothes. Oh, I had enough clothes but they all came from Anderson-Little. Anderson-Little was a New England factory direct retailer of men’s clothing and while their products were reasonably priced and decently made, they definitely weren’t cool (neither was I but that’s another story for another post). The cool guys bought their clothes at the small men’s shops around Yale University where the price of a single sweater could send my father into who-would-pay-that much-for-a-sweater paroxysms.

Diets

My Mom struggled with her weight through most of her years. My Dad seemed to eat whatever he wanted and stay thin. In many ways I regard myself as a nice mix of the best genes of both my parents but when it comes to weight, I’m my Mom’s son. There were about eight years during which I was running marathons and doing triathlons and I needed to eat extra to keep my weight up. The rest of the time I’ve been dieting or watching my waistline grow. My first crash diet was after we’d moved to California in 1971. Looking at a photo of me in a purple T-shirt taken in the middle of the desert on the drive, I observed that I looked like a big fat grape. The diet I chose was the Atkins Diet, a very low carb regimen that is intended to get you into a state called ketosis in which your body burns fats instead of sugars. Sound familiar? Yep, that is the basis for the trendy Keto diet which includes even higher fat content and goodies like Bulletproof Coffee. Coffee with butter in it. Oh, yum. The things we do to lose weight. We count points. We count carbs. We eat like cavemen. We fast. We eat according to our ancestry or blood type. We spend $3 billion a year on supplements like raspberry ketones and garcinia cambogia (thank you Dr. Oz) that are supposed to boost our weight loss. And IF we lose weight … we gain it back so we can continue to feed the weight loss industry. Are we happy yet?

Movin’ On

It is May 22nd, two days after my 75th birthday.  It was a lovely birthday.  My daughter, Amy, turned up by surprise from Utah on Sunday night just before we were leaving to see one of my favorite comedians, Jim Gaffigan at the Long Beach Performing Arts Center (tickets also a gift from Amy and her husband, Lars).   We went to the movies and had a very nice dinner on my birthday at the Cedar Creek Inn and on Tuesday, Amy took me to Disneyland (I can be a big kid still).  Now, she’s back in Utah and I’m still 75 (well, technically 75.005479).   One day of Yikes-I’m-75-Blues and its time for Movin’ On.  In our case, literally.

Seventy-Five

Today I turn 75.   A little over ten years ago, as I was approaching 65, I started this blog.  For most of my life until then, I had prided myself on Feeling Younger than I was.  The approach of my sixty-fifth birthday changed that, hence my first post was titled Feeling Old.  I blame the arrival of my red, white and blue Medicare Card for the transition from Younger to Older.  After years of monitoring my Dad’s Medicare, it was suddenly me that needed monitoring.   But I also could see that in some ways, these were the best years of my life and I started Older Eyes – Bud’s Blog as a place to talk about both sides of the aging coin … as the Slug Line says, Reflections from an Older Perspective.

G.F.C.I.

If you are a homeowner … and you have suddenly found electrical outlets in a kitchen or bath not working, you have probably dealt with Ground Fault Interrupters (GFCI), those clever little circuit breakers that open the circuit to prevent overheating of wiring or electrocution of people in places where electrical shock to humans is likely. Yesterday, while my wife Muri was drying her hair in our bathroom, her dryer suddenly stopped working. The outlets in the upstairs guest bathroom, the downstairs powder room and the laundry also were dead. As a 40-something year homeowner, I knew I needed to find the outlet with the reset button to turn the power on but I checked every outlet I could find without success.   Surely, I thought, the trusty internet will show me a way to track down an illusive GFCI outlet.   However, other than offering some suggestions as to the unlikely places where it might be located (the garage … outside … the other end of the house), the advice amounted to, Keep looking.  Good luck.  Two days later, we still had no power in our bathrooms and my usually patient wife, Muri, was getting tired of drying her hair in the dining room.

My son, Aaron, suggested that the missing outlet might be behind one of the two wall cabinets in the garage, one which was put up by the previous owner and one that was put in by my son under my direction.   Certainly, I would never have cabinets put in front of an outlet but several interesting upgrades by the previous owner suggested it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility for him.  Then I had a brainstorm.  I asked the neighbor across the street who has the same floor plan if he knew where the GCFI outlets was.   He pointed to a spot on his garage wall behind a large pile of boxes … corresponding to a spot behind the cabinets my son and I had installed.  Shit.  Sure enough, when we looked behind with a flashlight, there it was, close enough to see but too far to reach.   I can’t believe I put the cabinet there without cutting an access hole, my son said.   So we looked … and he had.  Yay!

So, Muri is back to drying her hair in the bathroom and Aaron is feeling like a hero.  Me?  I’m using the incident to feed my poor hungry blog.  Have a great Sunday.