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Kitchen Table Kibitzing ~ 7.1.24 [1]

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Date: 2024-07-01  

I want to find a way to make peace with growing old. Though truthfully, I don’t want to get old at all. I want to go back in time to when I was 18 or at the very least get my 28-year-old body back.

When I say I want to make peace with growing old, perhaps I should have thought of this sooner, I’m 67, I’m already old. I don’t much like it either. I knew I was going to get wrinkly but what are these blue lines on my feet and these brown spots on my hands?

Over the past several years the batteries have run out in all the clocks in my house. I don’t know why I haven’t put new ones in, maybe because I am trying to ignore time.

I thought I would have “all the time in the world” (how much time is that anyway?) You know, to make enough money, to get back in shape, to accomplish something. My plan was to retire in Canada, live on Prince Edwards Island and do... what, I don’t know.

I realized that I have a lot of fear about getting older. What if something happens and I can’t take care of myself? I don’t have anyone to take care of me and I can’t afford to pay someone.

I think and try to plan. Right now, I pay someone to bring my trash can up the hill to the street where the trash guys come pick it up. I’ve fallen twice doing it by myself. I’m also planning on how to turn my house into 2 apartments and then I could rent one out at a very low price that would include taking care of me a bit.

I asked my therapist why there weren’t any 12 step programs for people who were aging.

We admitted that we were powerless over aging and that our wrinkles had become unmanageable. We came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to youth.

Or something like that. My therapist asked if I would like to be in a group with other aging folks. I would, I would! I want to see if they have blue lines on their feet and brown spots on their hands.

How about you?

An Old Story by Tracy K. Smith

We were made to understand it would be

Terrible. Every small want, every niggling urge,

Every hate swollen to a kind of epic wind.

Livid, the land, and ravaged, like a rageful

Dream. The worst in us having taken over

And broken the rest utterly down.

A long age

Passed. When at last we knew how little

Would survive us—how little we had mended

Or built that was not now lost—something

Large and old awoke. And then our singing

Brought on a different manner of weather.

Then animals long believed gone crept down

From trees. We took new stock of one another.

We wept to be reminded of such color.

Z

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