<\/p>\n
Dropping Off<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n There are a lot of things about getting old that are difficult. Most of us woke up one morning and looked in the mirror and said “Oh, My Gosh! Is that me?” A friend who died a few years ago had a webcam before they were ubiquitous. He said one day he turned on his computer and forget his webcam was hooked up and jumped out of his chair in fright when he saw a withered-up old codger looking back at him from the computer screen. It was him. Most of us never thought we would be old and now look at us… the young don’t even know we exist. Hah! I was young once and I never thought I’d be old. I thought 30 was long enough to live when I was 15. My teachers who were in their 30s and 40s looked like old shriveled prunes to me when I was in middle school. <\/span><\/p>\n Now look at me…actually, I would prefer you don’t.<\/span><\/p>\n If you’re an old coot like me then you know what I mean when I say you only age on the outside, while the inside stays the same. You wake up one morning, look in the mirror, and see a 75-year-old ‘you’ staring back. That’s what it’s like being old. Though you’re old the young person inside is still you. You haven’t changed your sense of self. <\/span><\/p>\n Sometimes you think you can still do the things you used to do until you try to do them. And the world does not see the me inside, it just sees an old coot walking down the street. I think I’m walking just like I used to but I know I don’t. I still try to walk fast but if anyone looked at me they’d turn away because no one likes to watch old people do anything.<\/span><\/p>\n And sometimes I get deeply annoyed when trying to put on my socks or bending over to pick up something I dropped on the floor. But what really irks me about getting old is not being young anymore. It’s Nature’s cruelest trick and you don’t find out about it until you get there. And by that time, it’s too late to do anything about it. You may have acquired a lot of wisdom along the way but that’s about all. <\/span><\/p>\n No one wants to hear my wisdom. I am just an old curmudgeon. When you’re old, no one takes you seriously. You get a lot of uh-huh’s and head nodding. You’re not the life of the party, that’s for sure. And even when you do get invited to a family gathering all the young folks kind of ignore you after giving you a cursory greeting. I guess they think they have to.<\/span><\/p>\n If your family doesn’t live close by, and you have to drive an hour or two to see them, it’s a challenge. Driving at night drives me crazy and trying to attend a Christmas Eve celebration almost certainly entails night-driving. <\/span><\/p>\n I can’t see the way I used to no matter my competent and caring eye doctor. Why can’t people drive to see me? I’ll tell you why. Because I live in an outdated, non-open-floorplan house, which, my gosh, still has wallpaper.\u00a0 No doubt it smells like old people. And according to young scientists, old people so have an odor. It’s called the “old-people-smell”. See you doubt me, don’t you? Why because I’m old! But take a look at what Scientific American has to say. Read this.<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n People in auto repair shops think I’m stupid. I just had a starter replaced on my 12-year-old car (126,600 miles). One guy said it would cost “around” $800. But I’m a slick old coot… I used AI to find the average cost to replace a starter on my make\/model\/year of car in my area was $375 to $550. Armed with this info from AI, I got my starter replaced for $425. Just because I’m old does not mean I’m stupid. I know how to use computers as well as ChatGPT and Gemini.\u00a0 Most young hooligan slicksters don’t count on that when they see this old shriveled coot walk up to the counter.<\/span><\/p>\n And then there are all the people dropping off all around you. An old friend of mine called death “dropping off” and I rather like that term. It’s not as morbid or as final-sounding as “he dropped dead” or as euphemistic as “she passed on”.\u00a0 It sounds so much better to say…” Did you hear that Ralph dropped off on Tuesday?” <\/span><\/p>\n Family members, friends, and acquaintances drop off all around you all the time. My grandparents, parents, parents-in-law, my sister, two brothers-in-law, my cousins, three of my best friends, and a lot of people I grew up with, worked with, or were acquainted with, have all dropped off.<\/span><\/p>\n And all of that cuts deep because I know I ain’t gonna live forever. I am going to drop off some time and so are you. I just don’t know when. I don’t want to know when either. I want to wallow and hobble around in blessed ignorance.<\/span><\/p>\n I will admit though that this dropping off stuff does bother me a bit. I’ve been known to remind people that at my age I might drop off at any moment. My kids don’t like to hear it, but it is a fact.<\/span><\/p>\n OK. I’ve got work to do and I have to go to the grocery store for cat litter and paper plates. See? I still have a purpose in life and I won’t think about dropping off anymore (today).<\/span><\/p>\n But I bet you will.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Dropping Off There are a lot of things about getting old that are difficult. Most of us woke up one morning and looked in the mirror and said “Oh, My Gosh! Is that me?” A friend who died a few years ago had a webcam before they were ubiquitous. He said one day he turned on his\u2026 Read More »<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":26737,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[228],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28097"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28097"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28097\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28105,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28097\/revisions\/28105"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26737"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28097"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28097"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28097"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n<\/span><\/p>\n
\n<\/span><\/p>\n