As I ponder Medicare and the health insurance bridges thereunto, it is time to take stock of this body in its sixth and penultimate age, not yet “Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything,” (Shakespeare, As You Like It,) but, alas, well on its way.
Teeth are in decent shape and of full number (sans one canine), though they have required some patching and capping over the years. The front uppers and lowers reveal a flatline across my bite, indicative, it seems, of grinding. This old man has known some stress even in a quiet academic life—usually having to do with university administration and collegiate athletics—with the lowers ground down almost to the pulp. One trusts that retirement will arrest this development.
“With spectacles on nose”
In my forties, my eyesight began to decline, perceptibly and steadily. From readers, + 1 to +2.5, I degraded to bifocals, then an inelegant and constant switch-out from bifocal to readers (for computer screen work) and back, lapsing into “progressive” lenses, which rather indicates the regression of one’s visual acuity. And now at 64, my eyes host cataracts and a retinal edema, both age-related, which will likely require increasing attention, including, possibly, eye injections and surgery. Yikes. While far from blindness and hardly unusual, this loss of dynamic focus, this blurring of outlook, like living in an impressionist, sometimes kaleidoscopic diorama, reminds me that vision at any age is a gift and not a given, and prone to depreciate.
“the lean and slipper’d pantaloons . . ./His youthful hose, well sav’d, a world too wide/For his shrunk shank.”
Once an athlete, I no longer push and pound the body in old age in some effort to reprise my youth or even to excel within my age group. Those days are long gone, nothing to prove. That long discipline has, however, left me fundamentally sound and confident physically, with a good training sense, along with memories, both muscle and cerebral, of competencies, some now lost and of questionable value to regain. Flexibility has diminished along with balance. Putting on my socks and taking off my pants can require conscious effort, frequent exterior support, and sometimes planning. Plantar fasciitis spikes the soles of my feet from time to time. MyChart records lumbar degeneration, arthritis, and bone spurs. I’ve suffered benign situational vertigo, an inner ear affliction not uncommon to my young ER doctor’s “older patients.” And now, Dupuytren’s contracture, a condition associated in my case with heredity, ethnicity, sex and age—“male over 40.”
The Bard noted not the deterioration of our largest organ, the skin, in his roster of aging maladies. Once smooth and sun-bronzed, I now pay a price in sarcomic and melanomic lesions, actinic keratosis, tags, moles, erythematous scaly macules, lentigines, and cherry angiomas speckling my crepey epidermis, but, thankfully, not the highest price. The damages are mostly cosmetic at the moment. All in all, my body has remained more than serviceable.
At the gym I encounter my elders, really old guys, in the seventh age. Flaccid-armed, pale, pot-bellied bodies shuffling about, their flat asses awattle from the shower, their glutes shriveling, but not as yet fully shriveled grapes. Live long enough, I become thee, old, old man. A bald, gray grizzled, deeply lined, almost blind, dizzy, splotchy, arthritic assembly of bone, stringy muscle, and webby skin.
I can still hear pretty well, though, my wife saying “You’re all right”—for an old guy.
