If one more person comes up to me and wishes me a ‘Happy New Year,’ I swear I’m going to scream. Don’t they see my gray hair. Fortunately, I’m not wrinkling yet, but that’s thanks to the good genes I inherited from my grandmother. She didn’t start to show wrinkles until she was in her nineties.
But just because the snow-white hair on my head is the only visible sign of aging it doesn’t mean that I’m immune from the sneaky depredations of Father Time. I’m not as fast as I once was; in fact, since I fractured a femur in 2013 and they put in three metal pins—no new hip for me just for one little four-inch crack—my doctor has forbidden jogging and has cautioned me to run only if what’s chasing me is bigger than me, preferably with sharp teeth.
I still walk two to four miles a day, and I work at my chosen trade, writing, seven days a week from five in the morning until ten or eleven at night. So far, other than the unnerving feeling that each year goes by faster than the previous year, I’ve not suffered a lot of the maladies that have affected friends of my generation, except for one little thing.
I’ve become a grouchy old man. There aren’t many things that make me testy, but among them are people who wish me a happy new year and express their pleasure at seeing the old year tiptoe into obscurity. It’s mostly the young who do this. If they only knew.
They think they have all the time in the world because they still potentially at least have more years in front of them than they do behind them. One day, though, they’ll wake up and realize that they’re approaching forty. That’s about the point when the years to come are fewer and fewer and you begin to realize it.
At this point you can do two things. You can sink into the depths of despair, or you can find something that gives life meaning and sink your teeth into it and try not to focus on how much time you have left. Instead, you can focus on how many things you still have to do, and get about doing them.
That way, when those uninvited thoughts about aging creep in, and believe me, they will, you can counter them with all the things you’ve done and think about the things you’re still planning to do. You could do what I do: keep a journal. I actually keep three. One is a general calendar of Things to Do, one is for fiction, and one if for nonfiction, and I make it a point that when I check off anything from my To-do list, I add something to the bottom.
It works until about the last week in November. Just when everyone’s coming out of the stupor from overeating turkey and all the trimmings, they start saying Merry Christmas (which I don’t mind) and Happy New Year (which I do). If only I could get them to stop at Christmas. But, alas, people are creatures of habit. They don’t even mean it in most cases anyway. It’s just like saying ‘have a nice day.’ No one really cares if you have a nice day or not.
One of these days someone’s going to wish me a happy new year and I’m going to go full grouch on them and remind them that one day they’ll be in my shoes and someone will wish them a happy new year and they’ll feel like boiling them in oil.
If someone can come up with a way to slow time, I might have a change of heart. But until that happens, keep your greetings to yourself. Warning: Grouchy Old Man. His bite is as bad as his bark. | NWI
