Not for the faint of heart....

I had a long conversation with my friend Jack at a Christmas Eve party about growing older.

Jack is around my age--a year younger or older, I can't remember, but then one of the things about growing older is you can't remember things sometimes.

One of the interesting things about entering the second five years of the 60's is that often strange, inexplicable pains occur for a few hours and then disappear as oddly as they appeared. One day a few weeks ago, my right hip and left ankle hurt whenever I walked. I could have called the doctor but since the pain went away by afternoon I would have gone in and told him where it hurt for five hours but didn't hurt anymore. Today, this tiny inverted wart of a thing on my right thumb has been throbbing since I got up. But now, as I'm typing this, it suddenly doesn't hurt at all.

Jack agreed with me that unexplained body pain is part of getting older. A shame it is that just as we become wise, our bodies start to hurt.

I went to college with a guy whose name I can't remember (I am 66 and so is he and probably can't remember my name) who had all sorts of theories about 'body pain' which he claimed to have and assumed I did at well. Well, I didn't and if anything hurt (which it seldom did) a joint or two would make it stop. (Now that marijuana is legal in Colorado, I can admit openly that I have smoked it and, unlike Bill Clinton, I did inhale. I don't think I've smoked weed since our first child was born--38 years that would be--though I've been around people smoking it quite a few times. But if it was suddenly legal in Connecticut, I think I might give it another try....)

I wish I could remember my college friend's name so I could try to find him and ask, 'how's that body pain thing working for you now. He had red hair and a red goatee and dated one of the young women who came to St. Gabriel's Episcopal Mission, which is how I knew him. Of course, if he was having the body pain thing in his early 20's, maybe he didn't live this long.

Cramps are another thing that I have more and more the older I get. I wake up with cramps in my calves from time to time, and even worse, cramps in my thighs. But the worst cramps are the hand cramps--not so much 'cramps' as 'freezing'. When I drive a long distance, my hands begin to freeze around the steering wheel...and sometimes when I use the mouse too much to play Hearts or Internet Checkers I'll get a hand ending up looking like a claw.

All of this, my friend Jack (whose name I still remember) agreed with, item by item.

Who was it that said: "Getting old isn't for sissies...."

Whoever it was had lived long enough to gain some modicum of wisdom and experience some inexplicable body pain. God bless them, they were so, so right....

But I'll take the body pain as opposed to the alternative--that place where pain is over.

Was it WC Field's tomb stone that said, "All things considered, I'd rather be in Philadelphia"?

I'll take Philadelphia, thank you and put up with the inconveniences of growing older.