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Well, THIS Certainly Sucks!

Aug26

I’m 68 years old, and as for as long as I can remember I’ve always come down with a summer cold. And this year is no different.

It started with me not being able to sleep through the night. I was up several times, feeling anxious for some reason. When I finally did manage to get some sleep, I woke up with a sore throat, clogged sinuses, and a massive headache.

There’s something terribly depressing about summer colds–besides the fact that it’s the wrong time of year to get them. Colds are for the winter, when we’re already so miserable that one more thing piled on top of the cold, the damp, the ice and snow, doesn’t make that much of a difference.

But the summer is supposed to be for fun, not misery.

And so sit surrounded by tissues and cough syrup and aspirin, feeling sorry for myself. Hey! Nobody else will do it.

It’s almost 80 degrees out, and here I am, huddled under a blanket, both sweating and shivering, wondering which of the many gods I don’t believe in has it in for me.

And I wonder if I should call my doctor and see about getting this year’s flu shot–or if this is the flu and it’s too late.

I hate being sick.

Getting Old. It Ain’t For Sissies

Feb13

Are you of my generation? Remember when we actually had to go outside to play with our friends? And how rough we had it without Instagram and Snapchat? We had to take pictures with film cameras, send the film out for processing, then order reprints before we could go door-to-door handing out prints to our friends in order to show them what we had for breakfast two weeks ago. Or was it three?

Remember eating lunch at Tommy’s house, and calling his mother “Mom?” And everyone was okay with that?

I grew up in a military family, on military bases. “Sticker shock” describes the feeling I had when the cost of a movie ticket jumped from 15 to 25 cents.

And the theater itself! We had to walk a mile each way, uphill, in the snow to get there. Well, it was Texas flatland, so forget the snow…and the uphill. But it really was a mile. (I know this for a fact because that’s what the driver of the free shuttle bus measured it when I asked him.)

Later, in high school, the movie ticket was a whopping 35 cents, which made my Friday night dates (movie, drinks, and shared large popcorn) take a huge chunck ($1.50) out of my weekly allowance of $10. Why, to take my girlfriend to the Senior prom, I had to save my entire allowance for TWO WHOLE WEEKS in order to be able to take my date first to the Olde San Francisco Steakhouse for dinner ($10 for the two of us), buy her a corsage, and buy the tickets to the prom.

Nowadays the movie ticket costs $12 dollars a pop, or about half the price of a large drink and a large popcorn. I don’t go to those theaters, because the last time I went, the recliner armchairs were so comfortable I fell asleep and missed the whole movie.

I remember visiting my grandparents for family get-togethers, and seeing my cousins. We all sat around listening to the aunts and uncles moaning about their health problems. But you know what? Today, in 2018, that generation is gone…and when I meet with my cousins via Facebook, our discussions are the same: health problems.

We’ve become our aunts and uncles, our parents.

So when I see younger generations complain about us Boomers, I just smile and think, your day is coming.

“Five to one, baby. One in five.
No one here gets out alive.” Jim Morrison

Growing up – it’s a trap!