Steve Moseley

As a hair shirt wearer on the cusp of 73 summers, I feel keenly positioned to speak on the topic of aging in general and, more specifically, the daily challenges and annoyances of terminal old-poop-hood.

These range from the petty (it makes no matter which direction you choose to motor through the aisles at Walmart, the only open parking spaces will be on the opposite side) to the potentially lethal (inevitable age-related erosion of skills behind the wheel). Speaking to the latter, I received a well-deserved, scolding ‘honk’ earlier this very day.

Is our toothbrush wet? Absent a toilet bowl-related mishap, then we can be assumed to have brushed our teeth.

Energy and its conservation become more important with the passage of decades, making clever ways to save effort increasingly desirable. Here’s one you can use; to obtain peak efficiency, take the anti-diabetes, anti-dementia, pro-sleep prescriptions and whatever other pills she may randomly toss in the caddy morning and evening and wash it down with your daily dollop of Metamucil. It’s that ‘two birds …” parable you heard about as a child. Works surprisingly well. Less individual stuff to remember, too, which is nice.

And don’t even get me started on bifocal blight. When two lenses are not adequate to do anything near or far without muttered words you didn’t learn from your sweet mama, what is a person of a certain age to do? I go 250 and stand 6-foot-4, so you do not want to get caught between lenses and disappear in front of me. Small animals, inanimate objects too numerous to recall and the odd human child have learned of this peril first hand.

Remote controls for nearly everything we do in these modern times? Sigh. Where to begin?

Perhaps with an actual honest to goodness example of which I am not proud. I no longer watch any of the three dozen favorite movie DVDs in the cabinet for one reason and one reason alone; I cannot for the life of me remember how to manipulate which of the four (though it could be more) remotes in the drawer. I fell out of the habit of watching a movie semi-frequently for a few months and all knowledge of HDMI and the other maddening acronyms of that language were reduced to vapor. So now I pop a DVD into the laptop and watch on this wee screen instead of the 55-incher downstairs — when I can get the @&%$ computer player to work.

Are you familiar with sciatica? Chances are you will grow a personal relationship with the beast, as have I, at some point after you have aged-out of all relevance but not yet croaked.

One of my many desperate pleas, delivered as near full-volume as can be managed these days, is: “Not the floor! Please! God! Not the floor!”

The simple act of bending over to pick something up tightens the back of the legs to banjo strings, sends the lumbar spine into waves of spasm and sets the head a thumping. Far better, I’ve found, is to tweak the rotator cuff-afflicted, bone-on-bone shoulders trying but failing to reach something on a high shelf than to face that damnable floor.

Here’s another one. Don’t forget it.

Once 70 has been breached, under no circumstances venture outside your county of residence before the lady in the box is awake, alert and in full voice. Nothing delivers such comfort on the road to an older (read: sketchy, scary) driver than the modern miracle of GPS. Beloved size-14 Twisted Wire driving moccasins and a crystal-clear classic rock station land second and third.

Goodness, I haven’t opened a map in forever. Air conditioning and automatic transmissions are nice, I predate both, however nothing says “relax and enjoy the drive” like having someone aboard that knows to a certainty where you are going as well as exactly how and when you will get there.

And finally this; do not retire or even think about retiring until you’ve learned to say, “No,” repeatedly and with conviction. Fail to do this and you, like me, could find yourself with twice as many jobs post-retirement as you had before and for a fraction, or more likely none, of the money.

Turns out in many conversations the words ‘retiree’ and ‘volunteer’ are interchangeable, not mutually exclusive as wannabe sloths like me would prefer.