getting old – Lee Duigon

Talkin' turtles at Great Neck Wildlife Sanctuary | Wareham

Is it just us getting older, or is life really getting more complicated–more things to remember, more things to forget?

I mean, OK, sure, I hear from empty-headed liberals, “Get with it, grandpa!” Like I would even want to get with it. Their bodies may age, but their brains stay 12 years old forever.

This is an old box turtle, in the picture: you can tell by the growth rings on his shell. Instead of growth rings, we have additions to our things-to-do lists. (Ah! We just remembered to give the cat her medicine. Now we don’t have to worry about forgetting it.)

It seems, though, that there are more and more forms to fill out, more hoops to jump through–and how we ever got those things done when we were both working full-time outside the home… well, it beats me. I’m pretty sure we had no super-powers.

Is this the “when you feel old” that they used to warn you about when you were young?

7 Reasons Why Your Car Won't Start

Aunt Joan died two years ago, and we’re still trying to finish the paperwork on her estate–which, by the way, has no freakin’ money in it for anybody but the state, but generates an infinite amount of paperwork. So I had to make an appointment with the bank just to come in and pick up some papers.

But they wouldn’t let me in because I forgot my mask, they didn’t have any masks to spare, and they made me go back home to get one. And when I got back home, my car wouldn’t start again. I don’t know why: just conked out in the parking lot. A neighbor had to come out and help me push it into a space.

I am not used to not being able to push my car without help. Gettin’ old. I had to drive back to the bank in my wife’s car and get those all-important papers. Now I need to find out if our auto repair guy is open and whether I can get my car towed there.

Blood pressure through the ceiling. Must try to calm down. Thank heaven for cigars.

I might as well get back to work. While my car was running, by the way, the canned network nooze kept banging the “We’re all gonna die” drum, hospitals overcrowded, no place to put all the dead bodies, same old bilge we get all day, every day. “It’s so hard to comfort people when you’re not allowed to hug them!” “Everybody knows that when you go into the hospital, you ain’t comin’ out.” This kind of, uh, reporting is traditionally great for ratings.

I really think we’ve had enough of this.