Sitting at a table in the gym at Champagnolle Landing, we nibbled on the cake for Bill Howard’s 100th birthday. A man with a cane wandered over to check out the action. Not recognizing hat the birthday cake celebrated 100 years, the elderly man proudly announced, “Well I am pretty old. I have had my 80th birthday.”
“Well this is Bill’s 100th,” a cake eater said.
“One hundred! And I thought I was old,” the 80 year-old stepped back.
“At 80, I was jogging five miles a day,” Bill mentioned.
Jogging at 80? Few at Champagnolle Landing could say that. Most hang out, eat lunch, play a few games, and maybe exercise. Bill does hundreds of leg exercises to ward off the effects of neuropathy in his legs. Recently he began carrying a staff-like cane.
With the encroaching neuropathy in mind, he said, “I am not too sure I want to live to be 110.” Still, with all his exercises, he might make it.
Future ages sound impossible whatever our age. Pre-schoolers proudly hold up fingers on one hand to show their age. To them a teenager generates awe and disbelief. Every little kid wants to be that big.
With a child’s’ limited concept of time, our oldest approached his dad when he was about eight and asked, “Dad, how long after that flood were you born?”
Puzzled, hubby asked him, “which flood are you talking about? The one by the grandparents’ house?”
“No. You know that big one with the ark and Noah.” the child explained.
Hubby laughed and made a timeline on a piece of drywall to show him how very long ago Noah’s flood happened compared to their birthdays. Father and son’s birth dates nearly touched each other compared to the dates from Noah to Christ and from Christ to that day in the 1970s. The child still looked at his 34 year old dad as “old.”
To teenagers and middle school children, anyone no longer in school is “old.” Or as the teen on the show “The Mentalist” said to adults “Anyone out of high school looks old to me.”
How old is really old? In his 20s my husband knew he would be really old when he reached his 40s. He expected to be just like his dad with white hair and dentures.
However, unlike his dad, Hubby, at 84 still has his own teeth. It took to his mid-50s before his hair began to gray. These days he finally sports thinning white hair.
How old is old? Well my dad kept a hearty active life jaunting around the country until shortly after my mother died at the unexpected age of 60. It affected him. He suffered a stroke, had diabetes, and developed dementia. He began to look and act old. He slumped in his wheelchair that last year, although he still looked young when he passed in his mid-70s.
How old is old? Well, that depends on one’s perspective. In middle school, I looked ahead to the year 2000 and realized my siblings and I would be in our mid to late 40s. At the time I thought, “Wow! We will be older than our parents are now.” (My parents had us five children very young.) Today we all are a quarter of a century past that. Wow!
I don’t feel much older now than I did in 2000 or much different than I did in the 1960s when I looked ahead and considered how old I would be by then. Now Mr. Howard’s 100 sounds old, but with all those exercises, he looks pretty good. That definitely is something I want to emulate.