Yesterday on my birthday, I became an octogenarian. When people ask how do you feel when you are eighty, I guess I would use the following analogy. I feel like a twenty-year-old car with 250,000 miles on it. Even though my oil has always been changed on time and I never sat out in the winter or hot sun, my check engine light does blink from time to time. My finish is tarnished and my glass is foggy, I have a few dents and scratches but every morning I do manage to start up again. Using the analogy of the automobile again-- if I may beleaguer the point--- some people would say it’s time for a trade in but I’m not sure what you would get for me this late in life. Some people would say let’s just keep the old girl around and drive her gently. Not sure why men always name their cars with girl’s names but they do. As for gently, I guess that’s a given taking into account my condition.
You know life is funny in some respects. Back to the car analogy, when buying one you order them up with all of the bells and whistles you can afford but new humans only come in the same old basic model. There is immeasurable room for adding extra things in life but you have to add those all yourself and it sometimes takes a lifetime to get the full and best package. So, the older you get, the more you can be, all that you want to be but there comes a time and it’s not a definitive time, but a time when not much more can be done. Your maxed out and somewhat worn out. Then something wonderful happens and it’s called satisfaction for a life well lived. Yes, you can now rest on your laurels.
Old blue eyes, AKA Frank Sinatra, once sang a song called My Way. Although I liked the song and loved Sinatra, I felt the lyrics were a little egotistical. You see all of us are bits and pieces of mentor’s guardians,’ teachers, family and friends that helped us add all of those extras I talked about in the paragraph above. I totally agreed with Franks lyrics when it came to regrets, as I too “have had a few- but too few to mention. I too, did what I had to do and saw it through without exemption.” But my way- no way- it was our way.
I decided to buy a smart watch for my birthday and I’m not sure if they call them smart watches because they are smart or if you have to be smart to use them. I know they don’t come in stupid, medium smart and extra smart. They only come in smart. But how you utilize them is a learning lesson. Someone my age with a sometimes technically challenged mind, can be in a fog with things like this. It’s at best, a learning curve that stretches the limits my old brain has to work with. I guess it’s you that has to have most of the smarts to make the watch smart. The watch just doesn’t give a damn one way or another.
I once read an old saying that for the life of me I can’t recall where, but it went something like this “To the unlearned, old age is the winter season but to the learned, old age is the harvest time.” Every day great minds are stilled and the biggest travesty of all of it, is the wealth of knowledge that follows them to the grave, never to be used again unless they shared it. So, when some old codger tries to share something with you, it might be good to listen. He may have just learned it all the hard way and he’s trying to spare you the tears.
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