What is it that they tell us?
Oh, yeah, that you’re only as old as you feel. And age? It’s only a number.
That’s all reassuring, but what if that number seems like nothing less than 666…that’s right, the number of the beast. And what if how “you feel” compares to falling down a bottomless, pitch-black pit, and the soundtrack during your horrific plunge, other than your own silent terror and the sound of your fading heartbeat, is the screams of none other than the late, great comedian Sam Kinison: “OH, OOHHHHHHHHHHH! It’s only a number! OH, OOHHHHHHHHHHHH! You’re only as old as you feel! OH, OOHHHHHHHHHHHH!”
God, I miss Sam.
I’ve been 39 for almost 11 months now, and as 40 gets closer on the calendar, I have taken an I-couldn’t-care-less approach. I mean, really, it is just a number. And I feel pretty good. My stamina is up at the health club, and, best of all, I didn’t get rabies from that stray cat that tried to eat my right hand for supper a few weeks ago. So life’s pretty good.
But, what has me worried is the fact that I am witnessing on a daily basis the complete, total breakdown of another person’s body, another person who turned 40 a couple short months ago. This person has run a 10K marathon, this person works out at the club twice as much as I do, this person has a lower blood pressure than I do and her cholesterol level? OMG! I’m so jealous!
She’s my wife. She couldn’t have cared less about turning 40, either. And why should she have cared? She’s got the world by the tail, the hockey mom extraordinnaire, a career woman who will proudly tell you she’s in better shape today that she was when we met in college.
But since that fateful birthday in early January, my wife’s life has resembled a made-for-TV tragedy, like when Bobby Brady found that little talisman during the Brady Bunch family vacation in Hawaii. No, there haven’t been any surfing accidents or tarantulas.
But she did break her glasses, and she needed a new pair. She picked out some metal frames, and immediately complained about how heavy they were. Soon, her eyes got all red, puffy and droopy, and it seemed as though her cheeks were collapsing. It was like she was aging in fast motion, kind of how the National Geographic channel shows super-speed video of maggots devouring a dead fox or something.
She has some allergies, and now some kind of metal found in her frames is among them. She went back to plastic frames, but also had to take a bunch of steroids to nix the reaction.
She wasn’t psyched about the steroids. Mainly, she didn’t want to gain weight. But then, for those 10 days or so, she was Super Woman. She had an edge, she was hyper, and hyper-productive. She ran three 10Ks at the club over a span of five days or so. She baked and baked, and stocked the freezer with her tasty concoctions. She’d juggle 17 tasks at once, then kick you in the butt with her free foot just for the hell of it. She removed every flake of snow from our entire yard using only a pair of chopsticks, just to be able to tell herself afterward that she did it.
Off the steroids, she crashed. She got a sinus infection. Microscopic spores floating in the air in advance of spring’s soon arrival suddenly had her coughing, sneezing and hacking-up like a truck driver. She cut her finger in the kitchen and it bled for, like, three days. Red wine is becoming her fifth food group.
And she’ll tell you it’s all because she’s 40. It’s her state of mind now, and it’s a downward spiral from this point on, she figures.
A buddy in the Twin Cities lent credence to my wife’s take just the other day. He turned 40 a few weeks before she did, and realized he was bulging a bit here and there. Not a big fan of sweating at his neighborhood fitness center, he remembered he was once a talented Pirate hockey player, so he found the nearest rink and hooked up for some informal, old-man games. Except the other players aren’t exactly old men. They’re flying up and down the ice, he said the other day, while he’s wishing the Zamboni would come out and clean the ice every 20 seconds or so he can have a smoke and, you know, catch his breath. The other day at the rink, during another bent over, huffing and puffing session, he heard what could be the worst three words a 40-year-old guy can hear, uttered by a guy half his age: “Dude, you OK?”
So, where does that leave me, as I stare down this approaching, milestone birthday? Well, things could be worse, much worse. I mean, seriously, not dying of rabies is, like, a major score for me right now.
But it’s coming, and I know it...40. All I can really do, I suppose, is take extra special care of my glasses so they don’t break, which, if my wife is any indication, risks triggering my agonizing fall into the middle-aged abyss.
