Ten Reasons It's Great to Be an Old Man

I have attained my grandfatherly years honestly. I will admit I had hoped for a few more grandchildren than I wound up with, but my children have stubbornly refused to reproduce in the quantities I had in mind. I gave up my armada of boats, my ton of fishing gear, my sporting goods bag (in case a ball game broke out among my 18 grandchildren that, sadly, never materialized), my scuba diving equipment, my train sets, most of my game collection and all but a few of my young people oriented book collection (even "Mike Mulligan & His Steam Shovel" was passed along to the one grandkid we've determined to spoil rotten).  I have two grandsons, one of whom is 2300 miles away is adopted and whom I love like one of my own children and visit weekly by Skype. My other grandson currently lives in Tennessee and moves around a lot, I've never met him and have only made tentative contact with him through Facebook recently so we don't know how that will go yet. 

 

So my dream gig as the fun grandpa has been abridged significantly. I had a fleet of canoes and equipment all ready to lead family floats down the mighty (and fairly safe) rivers of Texas. I even trained as a Red Cross swimming and canoeing instructor. Man I was ready. Oh well. "The best laid plans o' mice and men oft times gang agly" as Scottish poet Bobby Burns once opined.

Still there are some definite advantages to becoming an old geezer and a few disadvantages like arthritis to make you appreciate the good bits.  So let me list the good stuff that comes with being an old coot.

1. People don't expect you to dig ditches. It surprises them if you do pick up a shovel and they are appreciative since they didn't think you were going to help. AND they keep offering you drinks and asking you if you need to sit down for a minute.
2. Your children and their spouses ask you if you want to take a nap and think it's funny when you snore. You actually win points with your offspring, your spouse and your various descendants when you pile up in the recliner for an afternoon snooze.
3. You finally have accumulated an assortment of favorite things that don't get thrown out by your significant other because either they are ugly or you don't need them. By the time you are eligible for social security you own some things like mugs, recliners, fishing gear, Hawaiian shirts, and books that your wife tolerates and won't slip into the Goodwill donation box when you aren't looking. Figuring out what you can keep is a process of elimination.
4. Arthritis is a great excuse for avoiding unpleasant tasks. Conversely, when you actually get around to doing one of those honey-do projects, you get a brief respite from the admonishment to get-er-done!
5. You have a collection of favorite TV shows you really like. Better still, because you've previewed and selected the good stuff you enjoy, you don't have to wade through the depressing post-modernist crap your kids and grandkids think is relevant. 
6. You have a favorite music collection that is wonderfully eclectic. I've got more than 500 songs in my phone's mp3 list and a pile of CDs, cassettes and vinyl that I'm gradually converting to digital mp3s. I defy anyone to look at my digital collection and find a bad song or at least one I don't like. I've got every thing from Pearly Shells (Don Ho) to Dead Skunk in the Middle of the Road, from Doris Day to The First Highlanders Pipe Band playing Amazing Grace, from I'm My Own Grandpa to Brown-Eyed Girl, from Monkees, Beach Boys and Beatles to Placido Domingo, John Denver, Earl Scruggs, Burl Ives and Audio Adrenalin. My personal radio station never plays a song I don't want to hear or interrupt the music with a commercial for Honest Bob Vanderhoort's Used Cars.
7. You can sit on the back porch in the sun for 4 hours and it feels like you had a productive afternoon.  It is no longer necessary to tick off a list of things you need to meet your life goals. Sitting on the back porch playing your guitar and feeding the squirrels in the sunshine WAS one of your life goals.
8. You know how to do stuff that makes you happy. You play the guitar, banjo, dulcimer or Irish bodhrain, You build model ships. You can make your own bookshelves. You have time to write that novel you always wanted to write. You can cook things you want to eat and you're pretty good at it because you have lots of practice.
9. People no longer ask you to help them move. You can go over if you want, but you are participating in more of a supervisory role because you have a lot of experience in how to move and pack having done so many many times in your life.
10. Little things give you immense satisfaction.  A favorite restaurant, a walk down a country lane, a grandkid coming to visit, birds coming to your bird feeder outside your window and you can watch them from your easy chair. You, in fact, have an easy chair and people save it for you. 

There are other things I'm sure, but I just can't remember them now. In fact, people don't expect you to get ten things pulled from memory in the first place, so when you do, you get credit for being kind of old, but still sharp as a tack.

Time for my obligatory Sabbath afternoon nap.

© 2021 by Tom King

 

 

 

A Pain in the, Well...........Everything

You know how actors, comedians and some of us old people develop catch phrases over time? Stuff we repeat over and over a lot. Donald Trump's is "You're fired!" Chef Emeril Lagasse says, "Bam" a lot. The Robot on Lost in Space says, "Danger Will Robinson!" Billy Crystal used to say, "You look mahvelous" when he did his Fernando Lamas schtick. My own catch phrase used to be "I'm working on it." Sheila would ask me if I'd finished something she'd told me to fix and.....

Sheila and I have developed new catch phrases of our own lately. Hers is "I'm sick to my stomach." Mine's "I know. I'm sorry." My other catch phrase is "Ow!" It's something I say when I get up out of a chair (or sit down in one), when I'm bending over or straightening back up again. I say it so often, I sometimes catch myself saying, "Ow" for now reason at all other than I haven't said it in a while.

You see these commercials all the time that ask, "Are you in constant pain?"  I never really thought of myself as being in constant pain before. I have a pretty high tolerance for pain myself. I have ADHD and a profound lack of grace. The only thing I haven't done to myself is broken a bone or cut off a limb. Other than that, I spent most of my youth with one sort of bump or bruise, stitches (32 some-odd) or abrasions for most of the time back then, when I was young and believed myself to be immortal. I seldom went without something or other hurting for longer than a week at a time.

Yesterday, Sheila and I went for a trip on the bus to Tacoma, the next town over to visit her doctor. We got to kidding about the noises we made getting on and off public transportation and I got to thinking. "Hey, is this what they mean by chronic pain? Well, this ain't funny at all!" The trip lasted from 10:30 in the morning till we returned to the house at 7:30 in the evening. It was 9 hours on a total of 8 buses - 4 over and 4 back. I was listening to Sheila tell the story to her cousin and sister on the phone that evening and noticed that the number of buses went steadily upward as she told it from 10 buses to eventually she settled on 12. I did not interrupt because I have been properly threatened that if I don't stop correcting her all the time in front of people, well, let's just say I won't like what happens. I figure accuracy in storytelling can most likely afford to take a backseat in deference to my current lack of major bruising. So you guys can just take your chances where accuracy is concerned when Sheila tells a story involving some kind of misery, discomfort or pain. I'm not saying she's exaggerating or anything, don't get me wrong. I'm just glad she doesn't read my blogs.

The total trip took 9 hours (12 hours if Sheila is telling the story because she throws in having to vacuum the house afterward and do some laundry she didn't get done because we were out and I ran back into town to pick up my freshly repaired computer). We hit the hay around ten o'clock that night. She woke me up again at midnight because she dreamed someone was knocking on the door. I stumbled around the house for a decent period of time so she'd be sure I took the threat seriously and then crawled back into bed. We got up at 8 after 10 hours of sleep and got up this morning to take her to get an MRI of her spine. We were gone for three hours (two Ubers and two buses and the MRI trailer). Sheila gave the house another scrubbing and was asleep by 8pm.

So Sheila is conked out on the couch tonight, while I've been trying to get my printer to work and sleeping sitting straight up at my desk while my printer software downloads. I finally got it working and am writing this while trying to work up the courage to stand up (ow) and go take off my pants (ow, ow) and climb into the shower (ow, ow, ow) and then pull back the covers and climb into bed. I have to actually do a little jump to get into bed now. Shelia keeps adding memory foam to the top of our Sleep Number bed so that the bed is so high that I actually have to make a little running jump to get up onto the mattress at night. And I can't turn my mattress down to 35 (where I like it), because she rolls down into the hole I create, so I crank it back up to 85 and live with the equivalent of one of those granite orthopedic mattresses for people with very bad backs. Fortunately, in my youth I accustomed myself to sleeping on rocks, hard packed dirt and assorted army cots, so I can sleep on a hard surface. The memory foam helps a little. I do make accommodations for my deteriorating bones and joints, however. I sleep with a big knee pillow so my knees don't get thrown out of joint during the night, I plug in my CPAP machine and sleep the untroubled sleep of a man with a clear conscience. Not sure what she's rolling and tossing about over there and I don't dare ask or I'll have to get up and fix something that isn't right.

All that said, I came to the realization yesterday that I am one of those people who have chronic pain. I don't know how this happened. I didn't notice it happening to me. Sheila's been in chronic misery for years - takes meds by the handfuls. Me? I hardly every take pain medication. I don't pay attention much to things that hurt. It's kind of become my default state. My only compromise with the aches and pains is to say "Ow!" rather a lot more than I used to. Sheila gets tired of the noise after a while and tells me, "Why don't you take something and quit moaning!"

That would be like surrendering and I'm just tooooo stubborn for that. So I say "Ow!" frequently, which bothers Sheila because she says it makes her feel guilty or something. I take an aspirin a day for my heart, and a couple of other things, but I'm going to have to pass another kidney stone before I take "pain medication." Sheila says I'm stupid to just suffer like that.

She may be right.

© 2018 by Tom King


PS: I did pass another kidney stone and I did it on Tylenol. Ha!

Is it Really Boomers vs. Millenials?

Millennials need to remember how fast us old
Baby Boomers can get organized.

 

There's been a spate of articles lately about the apparent friction between the Boomer generation and the so-called Millennials. Apparently, our precious snowflake grandchildren can't understand why us old geezers don't shuffle off to Buffalo now that we're old and useless. It's our fault their taxes are too high and that we're taking 14% out of their paychecks just to keep us on life support. Why can't we just die with dignity and get out of the way of the truly important people - the 20 to 45 year old demographic.

We boomers do have a lot to answer for. Our parents spoiled us more than a little bit after they survived World War II and who could blame them? We were just so darned cute and the war against the Axis was truly horrific! Who could blame them for showering us with affection and gifts?

When the sex, drugs and rock n' roll culture we embraced caught up with us and we started having kids, it was confusing. So many of us were so tied to the "don't trust anyone over 30" thing that we sort of missed the significance of that philosophy when we hit our third decade. Like our parents, we did some spoiling our own babies and in the process we raised up a generation that saw us role model that disdain for older people and couldn't miss the hypocrisy when we tried to pretend we weren't our parents after all.

Boomers inevitably got older and we were self-centered enough to figure out the realities of life weren't exactly what we thought they were. Then, sometime in the early 80s, we treated the nation to the sight of a bunch of aging hippies like me voting Republican and listening to Rush Limbaugh while nodding our heads vigorously.

Unfortunately, while boomers were taking an extended voyage of self-discovery, we missed the part where we were supposed to teach our own young-uns some values. The next-generation wound up becoming barely competent parents as so many of us Boomers were so busy rejecting out parents values that we didn't do very well at teaching our kids some values for them to reject when they became young adults. Because we were so torn between reality and what we learned in the 60s and 70s our kids had to have been confused.  Then they raised up this latest bunch of seriously self-absorbed and entitled precious snowflakes.

By then our own parents were aging and our parents did teach us some values, so we boomers not only wound up raising our own kids, but then we felt duty bound to take care of our parents. Then a lot of us got stuck with our grandkids because their parents were too busy feeling good and doing it to raise their kids.

And then joy of joy, when we started declining into our supposedly "golden" years, we find we're living in the mythical land of Tir Na Og, the land of youth, where youth is everything (especially to advertisers who cancel all my favorite shows because they skew to an older audience like me). Youth is all that's important and we buy hair dye, viagra, plastic surgery and artificial boobs in an attempt to pretend it's not happening. When finally we look in the mirror and discover we are well and truly old people, we are expected to voluntarily shuffle off into oblivion before we cost the kids any serious inconvenience. 

What the snowflake generation doesn't realize is that we boomers actually control about 75% of spendable cash in this country and make at least that percentage of the financial decisions that get made in the USA. Also us boomers are experienced revolutionaries. We did the Civil Rights thing and protested war and stuff. We could make some serious trouble if we wanted to. And we're just crazy enough to do it and there's not enough medication in the world to prevent it. Remember, we lived through the 60s and still had brain cells left. So as the mighty He-Man, Master of the Universe, would say, "We have the Power!"

And we are seriously thinking about cutting those little snowflake buggers off if they keep it up!

© 2018 by Tom King

Why They Call Them the "Golden Years"

Being in fashion? Not a problem.

There are distinct advantages to being a sexagenarian and it's not what just flashed through your dirty mind.  I have compiled a list of some advantages to being of an elderly persuasion.

• You have more interesting conversations about surgeries with your friends in a week than the average doctor does with his colleagues in a month and you've finally learned what a prostate is and what it means when it's gone. 

•  No one wants to kidnap you. In a hostage situation, you'll probably be the first one released. People let you ahead of them in restaurant lines, stores give you 10% off just for being you and you can sing along with the elevator music without shame. 

• Your kids hold family meetings down at the I-Hop about what to do about you (and you don't have to go to them). 

• You've discovered how to use the Internet to find out what's really wrong with you so you can argue with your doctor more effectively. Besides that, all that health insurance you bought is finally beginning to pay off. 

• Everyone's happy now when you take a nap in the middle of the afternoon and they try not to wake you up.

• Your kids bring you presents now when they haven't come to visit in a long time because they feel guilty. You've learned to use that guilt to get better presents.

• You can predict the weather with your joints and you're more accurate than the National Weather Service so you don't have to watch television weather reports anymore, which gives you more time to watch Matlock reruns on Netflix.

• Sex is as rare and as much appreciated as it was when you were 13. You can even get along without it. What you can't get along without are your glasses. 

• You are no longer expected to run – anywhere! And people don't think you're a hypochondriac anymore.

• People don't call you lazy anymore - in fact, they keep telling you that you should slow down a bit. If someone calls after 9:00 pm, they ask if they woke you up and apologize for calling so late.

• You and your fellow retirees control 75% of all liquid cash assets in the United States and you still remember your children and relatives who weren't nice to you.

• You don't have to remember anything you don't want to. Nobody expects you to remember anything anyway.

© 2014 by Tom King

Ghost Writing For the Not Quite Dead

It's so much fun to pound a keyboard 16 hours a day  till your fingers are nubs and your brain can no longer find a reasonable way to spell hyperbole. You should try it sometime. What keeps us going is the pittance that trickles over the transom and the hope that someday we're going to strike it big. We're the 49'ers of the 21st century.
Sometimes, you'd do better to sell yourself to an Arabian Sheikh as his personal toilet attendant. That'll do too. I've written better than 30 books in the past 18 months. All of them, I am told, are selling well on Amazon.com.

Not a one has my name on it.

But I chose this life and I'm damned well going to keep soldiering on in it till I win or they bury me - one or the other. I AM WRITER HEAR ME TYPE!

I'm sixty years old. My brain says I'm 22. My bones say I'm 112. We humans were not meant to live like this. I am thoroughly convinced that we were designed to live in lakefront bungalows, to sit on the porch every evening with a nice warm dog stretched across our feet and to play banjo till the sun goes down.

It's funny how you get to a point where you're ready to wrap it all up and get on with the living forever part. I've decided that when we get back to the new Earth, I'm going to build a big old schooner and take her out on whatever's left of the ocean. I'm gonna sail from island to island sampling the cuisine and jamming with whatever passes for a local pick-up band.

I will of course, take along the Missus and the dog - maybe even a grandkid or two - even in heaven I can't imagine my kids wanting to hang out with me for any length of time. I told my Sweet Baboo about my plans. She told me that it would have to be in heaven before she'd go out on the ocean in a boat with me at the helm. Mrs. King is not respectful of my sailing prowess.

I wonder. Will our spouses be as sharp-tongued in heaven as they are here? Maybe I was imagining the kind of spouses you get in the other heaven; the one where you have to blow yourself up first and then you get 70 of them.

Man, that sounds more like the other place to me. I have enough trouble with just the one.

© 2014 by Tom King

On Being Out of Fashion...

As I age disgracefully, I find there are things I want to do that have nothing to do with how cool anyone thinks they are. When I got myself lured up to the Pacific Northwest to aged hippie country, I discovered that a lot of my long-haired brethren from the 60s were here too and that the ones who moved to Seattle and Olympia were mostly raging liberals.

Out here amongst the trees, however, there are a surprising lot of long-haired conservatives, all heavily armed with everything from homemade knives and assault rifles to longneck banjos. Feeling right at home and a little irritated at the growing bald spot on top of my head, I decided to let my hair grow out.

The wife has long been my barber, due to the fact that I'm too cheap to pay $15 for a haircut. In recent years she's developed an essential tremor in her hand. I don't know what's essential about it, but that's what the docs say so who am I to argue.

The upshot is, I let my hair grow out. A lot of older guys on TV and even some younger ones had begun sporting pony tails, so I figured, why not. So I began a race to see if I could grow my hair out long enough to braid into a sailor's cue in the back before my remaining hair fell out.

It's a race at this point, but one thing fun came out of it - it boosted my acting career nicely.  Now when the youth department at the church need a Moses or some wild-haired minor prophet for a dramatic skit, I'm the go-to guy. I may even check out some community theaters and see if they need a Merlin or a Ben Franklin for some play or other. Might be fun. I've always wanted to do Scrooge on stage.

At any rate, now that my hair is growing out, I discover that pony tails for men are out of fashion again. As was explained to me, "That's soooooo 2009."

Ah, well, I'm doomed it seems to be out of step with the rest of the world. My computer's operating system will no longer be supported after April. If I update my operating system, I'll lose all my most useful programs AND I'll have to learn how to use Windows 8 or something equally horrible and probably have to upgrade my computer which I can ill afford at present.

I'm a teetotaler conservative, living in a state that just legalized marijuana and deregulated liquor stores, a Christian in a part of the country that's pretty much atheist or Buddhist or neo-pagan, a conservative in liberal hell and poor where the cost of living is somewhere around that of Palm Beach or Abu-Dhabi.

I should be at all surprised; it was inevitable that his was coming. When I was a kid, I was a skinny nerd in a class full of bullies and underachievers most of whom were bound for prison. From there I went to a Christian school where I was the only agnostic up until they gave up on me, at which point, I perversely got myself baptized.

My best summers have been when I worked on staff at summer camp, where my skills were actually up-to-date and useful.  I had friends who were a lot like me and if they weren't they didn't care that I was a bit odd. Girls even liked me for the first time in my life.

Approaching age 60, however, I find it's just me and the missus stranded out here amongst the Douglas firs and the roving bands of deer and psychotic squirrels. And me without a banjo!

I think God's messing with me. I suspect it's for my own good.

Tom

My Top Twelve Ways To Tell If You're Gettin' Old

(c) 2013 by Tom King

Lately I've been taking a hard look at my own mortality.  I'm trying to decide whether I'm getting old or just deteriorating a little prematurely.  I'm 59 and I don't feel old, except when I try to get out of my recliner, forget to turn on the heating pad or try to break into a trot while attempting to catch a bus.  So, anyway, I've developed my own personal top dozen ways to tell if you might be getting old.  To wit.....

1. If you have to tie your shoes in two or more stages because you can't hold your breath that long.......you might be gettin' old.
2. If you suddenly discover that you actually enjoy talking about your most recent surgeries.....you might be gettin' old.
3. If you talk baby talk to your dog..............you might be getting old.
4. If you buy a service dog vest so you can take it to the Wal-Mart with you.............you might be gettin' old.
5. If you actually call it "The" Wal-Mart",..................... you might be gettin' old.
6. If you suddenly discover that you actually enjoy talking about your dog's most recent surgeries.....you might be gettin' old.
7. If you've ever found yourself at the doctor's office and couldn't remember why you were there......you might be gettin' old.
8. If you've ever told somebody in the doctor's office waiting room, "Hey, that's my chair!"............you might be gettin' old.
9. If adult diapers don't sound like such a bad thing anymore............you might be gettin' old.
10. If you've ever been driving to church and had to ask your wife what day it was..............you might be gettin' old.
11. If you talk to your joints........and they talk back to you............you might be gettin' old.
12. If you take more than 15 pills at a time and most of them weren't yours in the first place..............you might be gettin' old.

I could probably come up with more of these, but I don't remember what I was talking about..

Has anybody seen my glasses.

Tom

I Become a "Biker"

We're now well and truly stranded up here in Washington State out  in the middle of a swamp surrounded by West Coast liberals with our truck back in Texas and three miles from the nearest store of any kind (and did I mention that I'm 59 with bad knees and and a spare tire that weighs more like an anvil?)  We're in spitting distance of a live volcano that is overdue to go off and I'm having to figure out how to write for a living.

So, somebody lent me a bicycle.  Taking it as a sign from God, I decided to go to town to "pick up a couple of things."

My Sweet Baboo didn't want me to go.  She figured I'd keel over dead alongside the road somewhere and she'd never know what happened to me and be trapped alone in the apartment and have to eat the dog to survive.  The dog went, "Say, what?"

But when I hinted I might be returning with chocolate, she relented and gave me a list with "a couple of more things we really need".

So I pulled on my backpack and rode off toward the nearest Safeway.  The dump truck did not run over me thanks to the handy driveway and all those tiny rocks that cushioned my fall. Once I got to the store, I chained up my bike and grabbed a basket.

Stores are insidious things.  The things you put in your shopping cart reproduce. I stuck to the list pretty well and got all the stuff she needed and then I thought of the poor little thing sitting back there all alone and started tossing "a few little treats" into the basket.  By the time I was done I had a pretty formidable basketful for someone who was planning to carry it all home on a bicycle.

Into my rucksack, I packed a six pack of Coke (in the glass bottles), cans of spaghetti sauce, a large bottle of laundry detergent, twenty pounds of cleaning supplies. a block of cheese and 40 or so pounds of dog food, potatoes and enough oatmeal to last the winter (next winter). When I attempted to shoulder the pack, I discovered that someone had poured concrete into it.  That thing weighed 85 pounds if it weighed an ounce and I still had three bags I was going to have to suspend from my neck.

What I did next is how I know I'm getting old.

I called a cab and went over to Subway and ate a sandwich till the cab got there.  I know the cab driver.  When she arrived, she got out and loaded me, my bike and my concrete rucksack into the cab, laughing the whole time.  The woman laughed all the way back to my house.

I either need to go to town more often and buy smaller quantities, or hitchhike back to Texas for my truck.  Either way, I'm getting too old for this kind of "bikering".  I'm seriously considering buying a Vespa and I don't care how wimpy it looks.

My knees are giving me hell this morning and my calves decided I needed a good double cramp, when I tried to get out of bed (which was a circus act in itself).

During the night, the wife had pinned me in on one side and the dog had pinned me in from the other and those two females were not letting me sneak out again for any more bike riding this morning- even though they loved the BLTs we had for supper immensely..

Ain't it grand to be loved like that?

Tom

Cinco de' Tom - My Annual Celebration

Walt Whitman, without any dash of humility at all, named one of his better poems, "A Song of Myself". While I do not pretend to the poetic talents of Mr. Whitman, I do understand the sentiment behind his paean to himself. Years ago my kids began to notice that I tended to break up the celebration of my birthday over several days leading up to and following my birthday.  Birthday dinner at home one day.  Birthday dinner out on another.  Celebratory movie and popcorn.  Celebratory trip to the mall to buy my birthday present.  Anything to stretch things out.

I think it was my son, Micah, who dubbed it Cinco de' Tom and teased me unmercifully about stretching out my birthday fun.  I don't care.  The last couple of years since I've been in Washington and the economy has been in the dumper, the celebration has become a little skimpier.  I don't mind so much.

You see it was never about the size of the party or the number of presents.  Good old Mom always come through with a nice present and birthday card for her baby boy and favorite kid, but for the most part, I settle for e-mail greetings and Facebook entries from the kids and Sheila bakes me one of her amazing cakes.  I made a vege-Mexican Enchilada Pie in keeping with the fiesta theme this year. When we can afford it, we both treat ourselves to a nice birthday bash in my honor.  She has just as much fun as me and, frankly, it would be no fun without her.

I think we should all make a festival out of our birthdays.  This year we celebrated our 39th wedding anniversary and my 59th birthday two weeks apart.  I'm planning to save up for a mighty bash next year as it will be our 40th anniversary and I'll officially reach geezerdom when I hit 60 on my next birthday.

I plan to party for the full five days.................while wearing a sombrero!

I deserve it.  Mostly Sheila deserves it for putting up with me for this long. You deserve it to, so go ahead and celebrate this year.  Make a big deal out of it. It's your milestone. Give yourself a treat and who cares what anyone thinks.

I discovered something about being reticent about birthdays.  If you don't make a big deal about it, your loved ones don't know how much you enjoy the parties and then they stop giving you one on the grounds that you must not like it.  If you do make a big deal out of your birthday, they rouse themselves to extra effort and throw you a nice birthday bash.

And when they do everybody has fun and how nice is that?  Years ago, I learned to my surprise that those who love you actually want to know what makes you happy.  If they know, they can do something for you that also makes you happy.

So every year, it's Cinco de' Tom - me spreading happiness (and making out like a bandit on the birthday presents).

Tom
(c)  2013 

Getting Old is Actually Kind of Fun?

(c) 2013 by Tom King

Wheat gluten "steaks" simmering in broth.

As I've gotten older, I've decided to do some things differently.  For one thing, we've almost entirely stopped buying meat of any kind and gone almost entirely vegetarian. It means more cooking time, but I find I enjoy cooking.  Who knew meal prep could be this much fun?

People become vegetarians for a lot of reasons.  Some hope to lose weight of to improve their health or live longer.  Others do it because the whole idea of eating living creatures is repugnant to them.  Some do it in order to feel morally superior to others.  Some believe it will help save the planet.

I do it for several reasons, not the least of which is my religion.  In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve evidently lived on fruits and vegetables.  Later God pitched them out of the garden and said here's some grain (carbohydrates).  Try this.  Then, at the flood He designated clean and unclean beasts and told Noah he could barbecue the extra clean ones during the voyage.  The human lifespan dropped precipitously after that. So I figure it's healthier to eat the plants.

But probably an even bigger reason for it is that I like vegetarian food.  I grew up eating both vegetarian food and meat dishes. My Mom and my Grandmother made wonderful dishes like peanut butter loaf, cottage cheese loaf and vegetarian hot dogs and hamburgers. We mixed it up with the real thing too and for economic reasons, I did eat rather a lot of baloney sandwiches as a kid.

To this day, I'm not terribly fussy to cook for, though as a practicing Adventist, I leave pork and shrimp and stuff like that alone.  If we're visiting or away from home, we eat what we're offered and don't demand others cater to our weird dietary restrictions. We feel that would be rude, but we are up front about being semi-vegetarians.

I'm doing more of the cooking now that I'm semi-retired and only working 12 to 14 hour days and since, I'm cooking, I can exercise my preference for vegetarian food over meat. It's safer, healthier and I like it better. Adventists as a group tend to live longer than other Americans by about 6 to 10 years according to some studies.  I figure it's the lifestyle - a lifestyle that includes an emphasis on vegetarianism and eating a good diet.

Don't get me wrong, I do like pie, especially the fruity ones that aren't too sweet and homemade ice cream is a weakness of mine. And I have to take my Sweet Baboo down for a steak once in a while or she gets cranky, but all in all it wasn't a hard thing for us to do.  We've always eaten lots of vegetables and vegetarian foods, and there are all kinds of vegetarian substitutes for meat.  You can order stuff made from tofu, soybeans, wheat gluten and other plant proteins and many of them like vege-dogs, artificial scallops, bacon and buffalo wings aren't bad. You used to have to buy them from SDA suppliers like your state's Adventist Book Center, but now you can order vege-burger and vege-chicken at Amazon.com. 

Also, if you don't mind a bit of work, a largely lacto-ovo vegetarian diet can be less expensive than buying steaks, fryers and chops. This week I made some gluten steaks out of wheat and white flour, some chicken seasoning and ten minutes or so of kneading by hand (my KitchenAid Mixer does the lion's share of the initial kneading of the dough).  I'll be posting a recipe soon at my Hubpages site with photographs and directions for making your own wheat gluten.  I'll put up the link here when it's done.

This summer I plan to go to some of those little pick-it-yourself fruit and vegetable farms they have up here in Washington and get some bushels of fruit and veggies to can for the winter.  We have a pressure cooker and I'm going to buy a bunch of those great old-fashioned Mason Jars.  Not only will we have good food prepared by ourselves without a lot of chemical ingredients, but we are also going to have some lovely decorative jars of stuff in our pantry this year if all goes well.  And we should have some very pleasant meals this winter. 

I've discovered that getting old gives you an appreciation for hand-made things, whether food or decorations for your house or even well-made kitchen tools. I'm collecting stuff for my kitchen the way I've been collecting tools for my workshop.

They say that in your 50s and 60s your right brain - the creative half of your mind - begins to grow again for the first time since you were a teenager.  It's kind of fun. Turns out the tools and telescope parts and all those unpainted toy soldiers I collected all those years may get turned into something after all.

Except for the arthritis, I'm enjoying getting to the age where I'm well-seasoned.  And even the arthritis yields itself to some creative solutions I've been trying out lately. I find I rather like ice packs and hot and cold fomentations to my joints.  And the exploration of herbal remedies has been like a treasure hunt.  That's how I found out that Aloe Vera juice and capsules help my knees work better.

How much fun is that?



- Tom

I Ain't Afraid of No Grim Reaper

I plan to join a band after I'm dead...

I see a lot of introspective, end of life weblogs being written by my peers lately. It seems that as soon as the old peak becomes fully snow-capped, we wax nostalgic and start looking back at our legacy.  Presidents and old people do that a lot.

Psychologist Erick Erickson says coming to terms with your life is the big deal psychological task of people nearing the end of their lives.  You look back fondly at the good stuff you did or experienced and try to make a story out of the heaps of steaming horse manure that inevitably decorate your life with unpleasantness.  It's natural, when we look at the ending of our lives that we want to know whether or not we will be well-remembered and whether or not we'll be the hero of our own story.

My son, Micah, asked a friend once if the friend though anyone would remember him if he died.  He had struggled for 14 years with a seizure disorder and I suppose he was always  aware of his own mortality. Two weeks after he posed that question, he died in his sleep.  There's not a day I don't think about him and miss him. He was 28, six months from graduating from college with his life before him.  He didn't get the luxury of ruminating over his accomplishments nor have the time to write his memoirs.  Yet, he lived his life well, left behind good friends, countless kids he was a mentor too and so many great stories, that his memorial service got more laughs than some standup comedians do. 

Not every old guy does all that ruminating. I suppose, if you figure this life is all there is, you'd like to be remembered for at least a few years. A lot of evil has been done in the name of gaining a place in history over the several millenia of recorded human history.  Being monumentally bad is the cheap way to be remembered in this particular iteration of the world.  Being remembered for good deeds usually requires some form of martyrdom to get your name on the final exam for World History 101.

Me, I have a hard time really getting my mind around the idea of being dead and no longer being busy doing things in the world. I haven't seen everything and done everything yet.  Death would be a monumental hinderance to my plans for world conquest.

It's my Christian faith, you  see.  When Jesus said that if you have faith in Him you have eternal life.  Note: He does not say you will have eternal life after you die and sleep and He comes back to get you.  As my grandpa once noted, "If you're going to wake up from it, then it's not really death."  It's like Burgess Meredith described it in Grumpy Old Men - a dirt nap!

So if death is nothing more than an extended nap in the dirt, then why in the world am I worried about my legacy.  I am, to quote Dan Fogelbert, "a living legacy".  So rather than spending my golden years searching for the meaning of my life, I rather believe I'll just keep on trying to make some meaning out of my life right up until I pitch over nose first into the dirt for that little nap.

Of course, I kind of hope Jesus will come and we can go straight on to the real work of shaping the universe in partnership with God.  How much fun will that be?  So, I currently plan to tool along doing the sort of thing I'll be doing in the New Heavens and New Earth - building things, taking care of the gardening, making music, telling stories, that sort of thing.  I plan to skip dying altogether, but if I do croak, I plan to die busy with all kinds of unfinished projects going.  I plan to wake up busy too.  I figure since I have eternal life promised, I'm already living forever and I really ought to act like it.

Tom

Old Bones the Wonder Horse Ages Disgracefully

 

I always thought I'd hang on to my youthful attitude till I died - probably jumping off something far too tall with a bedsheet tied to my belt loops to act as a parachute.

I swore I'd never be one of those old geezers who talks baby talk to a spoiled rotten dog, talks incessantly about what part of his crumbling body hurts worse today, the details of his latest surgery and has a "favorite chair".

So here I sit, propped up in an old Lazy Boy with it's seat shaped exactly like my butt at the increasingly ripe old age of 57. Daisy Pooh my spoiled rotten dog lies sprawled at my feet in a tryptophan coma, the results of a two day turkey mooch-a-thon.  My wife is burning a cinnamon candle on the bookshelf by my chair. She says I smell like BenGay and cabbage - not exactly what I was looking for, but if you use BenGay, there ain't much way to avoid smelling like BenGay.  And splashing on half a bottle of Old Spice only makes it worse.

I've tried it.

And why is it that the older you get the more your pants migrate away from where they are supposed to hang? Either they ride up higher and higher till you have to reach under your armpit to get your car keys or you have to hang a chain around your neck with one end attached to your wallet because your arms aren't long enough to reach your hip pocket anymore.

And hair begins to grow in places you don't want it and to fall out of places you do.  You suddenly have a favorite plate, a favorite coffee cup and a favorite spoon.  You suddenly discover you've been wearing loud Hawaiian shirts and really ugly shorts that you do NOT have the knees floor.
You know the end has arrived the day you look down and discover you're wearing black socks and sandals with your shorts and you don't even care because you're going to Wal-Mart and everybody wears their ugly clothes to Wal-Mart.

You have box in the garage with pinups of women who are dead now and you've seriously considered hanging some up in the garage and you don't care what your wife says about it.
And your wife wouldn't say anything about it anyway, except to mutter something like , "There's no fool like an old fool."

I went to the church pot luck last week and sat by myself at a table.  Three kids and a manic-depressive schizophrenic came to sit by me. The kids thought I was somebody's grandpa and thought maybe I'd give them some money. The schizophrenic elderly lady that came with them was about 85. Before we started up a conversation, she felt the need to assure me that she knew I was married and promised not to hit on me.

Now I'm manic-depressive........mostly depressive!

© 2011 by Tom King

 

 

Reaching

(c) 2010 by Tom King

Reach for the sky

When the moment rambles by.

Wrap your fingers 'round a cloud
And squeeze it till the rain comes out.

Dance upon the water,
Grinning till your face hurts.
Fling some sand.
Kick a wave.

When we get old
We start to forget.
What it means
To dance on the beach

What did it mean
To wring life that way
From a handful of sky
And a forkful of sand?

I wish that I
Could remember
How to reach that high
And laugh that loud.

Perhaps if I actually
Went to the beach sometime....
.

Is That Anything Like Corbomite?

"Prepare to execute the corbomite maneuver."
                                                       - Cpt. James T. Kirk


I walked into the closet this morning and stood there looking at the shelves and hangers. Then I just walked out.

"What were you doing in there so long?" my wife asked.

"I dunno."

Yesterday I came upstairs to the kitchen, opened the fridge and just stood there with a blank look. When I came back down my wife asked, "What were you doing up there so long?"

"I dunno."

I was sitting by the TV last night cycling through the 156 channels. On my 4th pass, my wife asked, "What are you looking for?"

"My favorite show."

She looked curiously at me. "Which is what?" she asked.

"I dunno."

This morning, Glenn Beck said that if I buy Carbonite and then lose my memories, I'll get them back.

I need to get me some of that stuff. Does it come in a liquid or a tablet?

Tom

Schrodinger's Lawn

"Wind"
An Acrostic by Tom King


Will I with courage face the closing of the day?
 In wrapping up my life will I be done?
 No, I expect to leave unfinished business here
 Don't grieve for I have fought my war and won.


My wife and I do not have the same set of values where yard work is concerned. I have been called "afraid of manual labor" because of that lawnological difference between us. I know better than to retort. Let her take her shot. She will go inside soon and leave me out here with the fresh cut grass and forever falling leaves.

The problem is, I think, one of basic gender values. Men tend to take the longer view; pursue more distant goals than do our women. We are, after all, the hunters in the hunter-gatherer partnership. In the poem, I express a very male idea. It's not accidental that women don't really get what I'm talking about here, but men do. Men seldom really finish our work. There's always more to do than we can get done in a day or in this lifetime for that matter.That's why we tinker and tweak cars, boats, sound systems, whatever! We plan on making them perfect eventually, but we never quite get there. Next time a guy shows you something he's proud of, see if doesn’t tell you not only how cool and powerful whatever it is, but he'll also tell you what's still wrong with it and what he plans to do to make it better.

Women on the other hand approach tasks as a series of nest buildings. They work very hard to pull everything into a nice nest-like enclosure and kill themselves trying to tie it all up in a bow. It's an exercise in futility though. There is always something undone left outside the bow and the basket. I think it's why so many women are unhappy. It's the way my wife does the lawn.

She'll kill herself to bring the lawn to the peak of perfection, not a leaf anywhere, the lines in the dirt perfectly parallel. Every blade of grass subdued; every flower standing erect. Then she stands on the porch, looks at it with satisfaction for a moment and then goes inside before the next autumn breeze can shower a ton of dead leaves down on her nice tidy lawn. She needs to see that moment of perfect in order to content herself that all is right with the lawn till next Sunday. Next Sunday, she'll start all over trying to subdue mother nature.

Me, I figure the grass is an on-going project. I know I'm not going to beat the leaves. I can be satisfied with the yard looking only generally better. While my Sweet Baboo is inside taking a bath and fixing her hair, I sit out on the porch, play the guitar and watch the wind swirl down the dry leaves and make them dance on the new mown lawn. I am content.

My wife is also content in the house where she doesn't have to watch the depredations of autumn leaves upon her perfect lawn. For her, it's like Schrodinger's cat, the physics exercise where you seal a cat in a box with cyanide and a radioactive trigger. The idea is that if you don’t open the box, the cat isn’t dead in there because you don’t really know till you open it. If Schrodinger wasn't a woman, he was certainly in touch with his feminine side.


So, for my wife, so long as she just doesn't look at the lawn, in her mind it's still perfect. 

Men don't much get that.......

© 2009 by Tom King

Old Dogs and Alpha Males

I love beagles. We had one for 13 years. Sweetest animal ever. Beagles are pack dogs and if they think you are in the pack, they are devoted to you. As far as Suzy was concerned, I was the alpha male in the pack. She was the only creature in my particular pack, however, that saw things quite that way. It's probably why I was so fond of her.
She always met me at the fence with a big old goofy grin on her face. It was nice to always have one living being in the house that was glad to see me. The whole family took it hard when she died, me probably most of all. I held her head in my hands as she died and wept.

The day she died I lost my alpha male status!!!

When I was a kid we had an ugly little mutt named Pudgy that was definitely of the lone wolf persuasion. She pumped out puppies like a factory and loved to start fights among the packs of male dogs that roamed the neighborhood. She had no loyalties to anyone except a temporary one to whoever brought out her food bowl.

With Pudgy, I was always having to work to win her respect. The day she died, I was with her too. I cried then. Not for the alpha male status I lost, but for the alpha male status I never had with her.

Finally, there was Shags, an ugly brown mix between a poodle and a duckbill platypus. This dog had dreadlocks. A neighbor once asked me if I was ever going to pick up that pile of old rags out of the yard - it was Shags in his favorite sleeping place. Shags wasn't the alpha male either. Pudgy wouldn't give him the time of day. When he finally died of old age, I sat with him all day long as he drifted away and cried my eyes out. Neither of us were alpha males, but Shags was the only dog that ever was able to share that with me.

I'm just sayin'

Tom

One More Year to Go.....

Yesterday was my birthday, the last one before I become eligible for the senior citizen discounts at all the stores and theaters in town. Last week I took my sweetie (who is older than me by 3 months) to Taco Bueno for lunch. The youngster behind the counter gave us the senior citizen discounts without even checking my ID. He said he figured Sheila wasn't eligible yet, but he was pretty sure I was eligible enough for the both of us.

As that famous philosopher Indiana Jones once said, "It's not the age, it's the mileage!"

In a way, I'm looking forward to the special treatment I'll get for being "hoary with age". How cool is it that they'll knock a few bucks off my lunch just because I outlived my old man by a couple of years.

Of course, Dad didn't die of natural causes. A lot of the men in the King ancestry died hard and young. Great Great grandpa Thomas Archibald King got kicked in the head by a mule and died at age 49. Great Grandpa Joe Henry King pined away in a sanitarium scarcely a year after Great Grandma Doney died suddenly. He was 51. Grandpa Thomas Adolph King was 79 and he died of heart failure- the first male King in 80 years to die of natural causes. My dad, Adolph Wilmot King died at 52 of a shotgun blast at close range delivered by my step mother. My brother died at 16 of a shotgun blast at close range delivered by a friend who claimed it was an accident. So far, I'm running second in the longevity race.

I plan to live to be ancient and decrepit, but I'm told I need to lose about 60 or 70 pounds if I want to do that. I'm going to take a shot at it again. I lost 40 pounds last time I got serious. I'm going to eat only two meals a day and do a lot of walking to see if I can pull it off. This time I think I'll do it a little more slowly so I can keep it off.

I do have some good genes on other sides of my family. Grandpa Bell lived well into his 90's. My grandmothers both lived into their 90's. My grandmother King's dad lived into his 90's. There were a lot of really old folks in my family, so I figure I've got a fighting chance of living till Jesus shows up, especially if we elect any one of the three candidates we've got running for president of the U.S..

I just want to get my bunker built before it gets too rough. I'm calling it an "Earth House", but it's going to be a bunker complete with a moonshine still for fuel, a windmill and a generator, a serious garden and enough musical instruments to entertain myself when the TV goes off the air and that little target deal with the Indian comes on the TV screen to tell me I can find out what's going on by tuning to something called the Emergency Broadcast System.

I'm just going to wait on the porch and duck inside when the bright flashes start going off over toward Shreveport and Dallas.

I'll probably bring in the cat, but not if she's going to keep clawing up the furniture....

It's late. I'm tired and I'm job hunting. I should think about what I'm writing before I start typing.

Just one man's opinion,

Tom