The Adventures of Aging

This is Steven Petrick Posting:

I am getting old, and I am not pleased with this.

This morning I had the curious effect that for some reason my left leg would not support my body. Any time I put any weight on it, it would promptly fold up. I could more or less walk, and while I was in motion it would at least function, but if for any reason I was stationary and put all my weight on that leg while, for example, trying to pull a boot onto the opposite foot, the leg would collapse.

Let me assure you that this was not painful, but it was not pleasant.

By the time I got to the office, the leg was working normally (taking into account that my knees have not been any good since the mid 90s). I can put all my weight on that leg and bend the knee and not suddenly collapse to the floor.

Sigh.

Aging is, in and of itself, an adventure. But it is an adventure of rude surprises and no pleasant ones. Seems that every day I get up and something I was able to do is no longer within my bounds.

I am not complaining. Overall I am in reasonably good health, but the days when I would tackle someone half again my own weight while playing football are long behind me. The days when a six mile hike was just a stroll are also long gone (they disappeared when the knees went bad). Running has, for a while, been classed as "I have the capability of one last short dash, and then knees will self-destruct at some point, hopefully after I reach the objective for the dash."

I still have a decent level of physical strength (it seems), and can manhandle whatever I need to manhandle to keep the warehouse working. My back, however, sometimes spasms and leaves me in great pain and fighting desperately hard to straighten up.

Worse, I have to admit that access to the brain as is not as sharp as it once was. I cannot count the number of times of late I find myself unable to access a word, that I fully know the meaning of, but cannot come up with the word itself.

All this I bear.

But, trust me, I am NOT happy.

Sigh.

In any case, I am sure much of the above while part of aging is also a result of my having "exceeded the warranty" on a human body many, many, MANY times over the 50 some years I have wandered this planet. So I really should not complain. I have come through major car wrecks (while I was NOT the driver), falls (including two really, REALLY bad ones last winter), a mugging, and other experiences, and at the very least everything still works. (The knees are very weak, but I can walk normally if no longer tirelessly with a heavy pack on my back, for example.)