This rangy dude had nothing to do with the post except maybe sorta the aging part |
You have good trips and not so good trips. This one was “más
o menos.” San Miguel didn’t live up to our ten- year-old memories and the
reasons are varied. We found that “living” in San Miguel was hard work, that
shopping for groceries was long cab drive each way, that all of life’s necessities
took effort and that I had picked a physically cold house that was too far from
downtown and that the walk back up the hill from El Centro was a sweaty thirty-minute
heart pounder. Take the inconvenience and add a house that you didn’t want to
be in and you might as well have stayed in a hotel in the center of everything.
Our street. The gray facade is our casa. |
It may be, too, that a month-long vacation is two weeks too
long. I’ll take that on advisement. Having to plan payments a month ahead and
find someone to mind the house is a stress giver that makes the trip too much of
a job. There were highlights aplenty, but the living wasn’t easy, and we never
felt we could just be. I arrived in San Miguel thinking it’s a place I could
live. I left San Miguel knowing it is not.
The cliff leading to El Centro. It's steeper than it looks. |
As is he case in the rest of Latin America, even Taos for
that matter, the cultures are separate. In San Miguel the Anglo community is abundant
and insular. And old. There were more bad facelifts than taxis and there were a lot of taxis. Restaurants and musical events in SMA reminded me of
movie night at the Taos Community Auditorium, a sea of blue hairs with advanced
degrees. I can tell you this, if I move anywhere it’ll be younger. I want to be
the oddity not the norm.
Which brings up the subject of aging or being old. It’s
cliché to say, “age is just a number” or “you’re as old as you feel.” It’s also
more or less true. I’ve been asking the musical question, “When are you old?”
for a couple of months. I set up the
subject with a disjointed preface that says something like, “I feel pretty much
like I did when I was in my mid-forties. I still do the same physical exercise
and hold myself to the same standard of effort as I did thirty years ago. But I
know that one day something will set me back and
I will be old and infirm. Presto chango. I also know that at 77 a very
optimistic outlook is another ten years of being able to do the things I do
now. I am not happy with the prognosis, Doctor. I don’t know any 90-year-old man-children. Strike that.
Bob Cooley in his early nineties say he skies better than ever with his new
knees and dances like a mad man. I want to be Bob Cooley when I grow up.
So, the question is this. Do you begin accepting the decline
before it happens or hold out till it smacks you in the face? I see a lot of
the former, the folks who acquit themselves as old people before their time. It
even happens in middle age. Back in Lincoln, Massachusetts where we lived for
23 years, the housewives of the Radcliffe and Wellesley persuasion became
matrons in their mid-forties replete with care free hairdos, scant makeup, formless attire
and sensible shoes. I want to be my mother.
“Are to you still running?” is something I get asked a lot.
I have the urge to answer, “Why wouldn’t I be?” I will till I can’t. And there
you have it. Do it till you can’t. That goes for absolutely everything. And
corollary to that is this bit of advice. Don’t stop (fill in the blank) because
starting over again is a bitch. Every day you don’t do what you do makes it all
the harder to start the old engine again. I’m testing that premise this very
day.
1 comment:
Once again, you have provided amazing food for thought in this blog post, Amigo! Jack LaLanne, who is one of our heroes, lived to be in his mid 90s and was doing more awesome feats at that age than most of us will ever do. And a friend of ours, who plays tennis three times a week and will be 88 this month, just had a knee replacement. After about 15 days of true "ick", he is back to walking and building his stamina. H wants to be playing again in February and we see no reason why he can't. And as another 80-something couple we know once said, "We can still take 15 mile hikes. It just takes a couple more days to recover." And well-deserved days they are. But enough on that. The photograph of the cliff leading to El Centro yells "Mejico!" Wonderful image. Your prose about San Miguel, bad facelifts, blue hair, etc. etc. had me laughing uproariously. Many of us feel like we are in our 40s, and, like you, we keep on doing what we do and do it again every day. Out of commitment to retaining that feeling whether our skin is like leather or not. Why not? Si se puede! And welcome home.
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