REFUSE TO GET OLD

REFUSE TO GET OLD

Michael Welge

         "Getting old really sucks!" Dan declared. This may be so, but I wouldn't know about that. You see, I steadfastly refuse to get old.

         I just hit that big B-day that none of us wants to see come but that none of us want to not be around for either. The folks who predicted that I'd never live to see thirty misjudged by a mile, but most of them are no longer around to take notice of the fact that, maybe I took a few lickings, but I'm still ticking.

         Although it has gone from glossy brown to silvery, my hair is still full, and I have to shell out the big bucks to get it trimmed by "stylists" who don't know how to follow instructions, because they know of a certainty that they know how your hair should really be cut better than you do, regardless of how long you have been wearing it and they haven't, and because all of the real barbers seem to have gone into hiding or something. (If you think that is a run-on sentence, think again. I can run my sentences as long as I want to, as long as they stay basically correct, grammatically speaking.)

         My mind still works like a steel trap (which is to say that you have to step in it to make it work), and I'm sure that my memory is still good, but I can't seem to remember where I put it in among all of the stuff I have stored away somewhere or other.

         Okay, so I have to sometimes---alright, already, most of the time--- walk with a "third leg" and the rest of the time with a walker, but at least Uncle Sugar pays me a monthly stipend for that. Then too, I too soon had to get a set of store bought teeth, because the ones I was issued were pretty much all worn out, all done in, and going on totally obsolete. Even though I've worn eyeglasses since junior high, my sight acquired a fuzzy quality the eye docs said wouldn't go away without surgery, but after getting one side done, along came this thing called Covid. The one eye got fixed for far vision, so closeup work is fuzzy, and the other keeps gettin'g fuzzier. Howsomever, they didn't want to put new specs on me 'til both eyes got done. But one thing and another kept getting in the way of getting done, so, five years down the line, I'm blind in one eye and can't see out of the other. At least I can still hear everything as clear as a bell; I just wish those bells would stop ringing and ringing and ringing...

         What it all comes down to is that if I hadn't decided some time ago to refuse to get old, I'd probably be in a whole lot worse shape than I am, even though some people still keep telling me that I'm in pretty sorry shape.

         But it really can't be too bad, because other certain people keep getting upset with me because I look younger than they do, even though I am the elder (I said elder, not older), but I'll just chalk that up to my naturally good looks and their adolescent envy. Thus and therefore, for the foreseeable future, I will continue to refuse to get old. I will merely become less young with each passing day.

         Now, if I could only get my body to get with the program, then everything would be just peachy keen.

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