Reflections of a shutting mind

62.

Senior Citizen.

Creases crisscrossing the face, crow feet around the eyes, gray hair dyed, skin dry, chest sagged, belly out, butt flopped, get coughs and colds easy, taste bud going flat, left ear a quarter dead, right ear, just dead.

Reading glasses in every part of the apartment. One in the kitchen, one in the bedroom, one by my laptop.

In the car I got one in the glove compartment, one in the cup holder, one in that part by the car door where you put stuff, my Bible is double large print.

Five years ago the doctors did their number on me.

Quadruple bypass.

The doc said "your organ is good, it's healthy, it's the highways leading to it are clogged 'sall".

Yeah, right, big consolation.

Couple of years before that, the doctors said I was diabetic.

So now, I pop five pills in the morning, and five more of the same pills in the evening, and avoid "this" and avoid "that" and check my blood pressure and check my blood sugar, lose weight, exercise daily.

But my body still keeps sending signals: "you're checking out real soon, old man. I'm shutting down very slowly, but also very surely".

No regrets.

God has given me a good life, a good wife, and good children.

I just wish I had been a better husband to my wife of 40 years.

Yessir, been married to the same woman for 40 years, and she could have found a better husband, but I could never have found a better woman.

The Lord is good.

Sometimes I sit in front of this darned laptop and pound away and I can hear her in the background fussing around, maybe sewing.

She's a seamstress.

She graduated Bachelor of Science in Home Economics at Silliman University in the Philippines, but seamstressing is her passion. It has helped raise our children, gotten her to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, then to the States, and I dare say, her sewing got me and my son here, too.

We've gone through some good times, a lot lot lot lot lot of bad times, most or all of it my fault, but she has always remained gentle, softspoken, quiet, and she has stuck with me, and I wonder why in the world did God give her a jerk like me ?

If anybody deserved somebody much, much better, that would be my wife.

She gave me three kids.

Wonderful kids.

The youngest just retired from the US Air Force after a ten year serve because he somehow got RLS (restless leg syndrome), he's married to a beautiful lass from Guam, and it looks like God will be good to him too, judging from the wife He gave her.

They have one kid, a boy, and I'm glad he was born in the United States of America because he won't have to go through the hunger, misery, and poverty that his father went through as a kid in my poverty-clutched country.

(I just wonder if that is really good).

So sometimes I sit and kind of pant after the old days, when I "wore a younger man's clothes" (like the song goes), and me ole buddy "down there" was as hale and healthy and "ready to go" as I was (not that he's already shut down), when a 10-mile run was peanuts and a heart rate of 180 went down to 65 in under a minute, when a mile's swim out to the bay and back was just to start the day with, and when I ate like a horse and didn't put on a pound of fat.

When the doctor took one look at me, made me breathe in and out and said you're "good to go" and was confident of it, too, when I read two books a day and retained the information and spat it out like I had the book right there in front of me.

Those were the days.

I hear my wife fussing around behind me and I put on the headset and click over to youtube and listen to Billy Joel sing of his River of Dreams and how everything is just a Matter of Trust, or go over to Janis Ian and listen to that lovely, lovely, sensitive, expressive voice sing of how things were for her At 17, and then turn over to Eva Cassidy and listen to her sing her covers of the same songs of my era and catch myself and think, "well, now, boy, you ARE a senior citizen".

LOL.

Yeah, my body is shutting down.

My wife doesn't seem to realize that yet, because she expected me to be able to drive back and forth between Buffalo and Maryland like 4 times in one week when we were moving down here from there last May !

But my body is shutting down.

Soon I'll be outta here.

Well, maybe not in a few years, maybe even ten, but, even ten years will be here soon.

My wife and I, we never had a house we can call our own and our bank account has always been like an accordion, in the 40 years we've been married we never seemed to manage to have a year when we didn't owe money to anyone or anything.

But all told, we're happy.

Our kids are grown, they have better futures, their kids have a better country (not that I regret having been born in the Philippines), we got a couple of plots at the cemetery back of the church we go to, where they can just dig a hole and stuff us in, wrapped in a blanket for all we care.

God has been good, life is simple.

I'm ready to go.

Shut it down whenever you're ready.