byChrisWhite – 2015

Growing old, my friends, is a confounded experience. A relentless, uninvited guest that shows up, settles in, and proceeds to ruin all your best-laid plans for the rest of your life. Now, if you’re one of my fellow baby boomers, or even a soul more seasoned than a cast-iron skillet left on the stove since 1972, those simple words might bring to mind a variety of other choice phrases. But being a polite Southern sort, I’ll spare you the expletives, this time, anyway. Although, I do feel obliged to warn you, should I have to readjust my doughnut pillow while penning this, a four-letter word may sneak in. So, proceed accordingly.

When I was young, back before we knew disco was a mistake, I imagined by now we’d all be soaring through the skies with jet packs strapped to our backs; we’d have a veritable squadron of gray-haired Icaruses gliding across blue horizons. It seems every other day now some headline touts yet another miraculous innovation: a 3D printer making plastic revolvers, a lung growing in a lab dish, or even rumors of Little Bo Peep herself getting cloned. And just last week, Emily and I, seeking the quaint delight of agricultural education, found ourselves learning weird stuff, unbelievable stuff, at a Beef Master class held by the local Agricultural Extension Office.

Now, would you believe it? There we learned you can render a not-so-great bull’s testicles non-functional, replace some of the gooey stuff inside with the stem cells of some prize-winning champion stud bull, and, presto! The animal has a whole new set of bullworks, DNA and all. I reckon there are some envious Wall Street fellows out there who’d like to book an appointment for that procedure.

And yet, for all these breakthroughs, I look out my window, and where are the jet packs? I ask you, the jet packs sir, where are they? All this science and medicine, and here I sit, my feet still planted firmly on the ground. At least when they aren’t complaining bitterly, that is.

Of course, it’s not just the feet. The good Lord in His mysterious wisdom has blessed me with an all-you-can-suffer buffet of indignities since turning fifty. It’s as though every joint and muscle in my body received a collective memo to revolt. Now, I can’t take three steps in Kroger without my hip deciding it has temporarily misplaced its socket, or my lower back forming a committee of disks to vote on staging a body rebellion.

Just the other day, I found myself in the canned food aisle, wrestling with a pickle jar like it was an Olympic weightlifting event. And wouldn’t you know it, by the time I reached the soup section, my hip had miraculously resolved itself, and I was left there standing like a fool, triumphant and bewildered at the same time. That’s aging, a parade of temporary triumphs over unpredictable aches.

There’s the tendonitis that’s taken up residence in my hands, like a squatter in a prime bit of real estate, preventing me from closing a fist without a negotiation. Plantar fasciitis, too, visits whenever it feels inclined, making me hobble about like a sea captain with two wooden legs.

Throw in the diabetes, tennis elbow, and whatever else my body decides to improvise. Just last week I learned that sneezing could be a full-body event that leaves one needing a lie-down. And speaking of, excuse me, I must duck out to use the facilities again. It’s one of those conditions no one ever told you would become an Olympic-level competition in frequency when you jump the hurdle of a certain age.

So, I ask you: is this what folks meant when they painted rosy pictures of their “golden years”? Was this the “living the dream,” I signed up for? Because if it is, I must have missed a memo somewhere. Retirement used to seem like some far-off, magical chapter of ease and triumph, and here I am, nowhere near it, and already trying to learn how to operate a retirement calculator, something that seems deliberately designed to make me wish I’d paid better attention in your eighth-grade algebra class. I’m still trying to make sense of interest rates, let alone figure out how to stretch my dollars enough to fit any version of a “retirement plan” that doesn’t involve living in an old Winnebago under an overpass.

The cruelest joke of all? I was counting on the future to be more interesting than retirement brochures and ibuprofen. Space odysseys on the big screen made us believe we were destined for greatness. “Lost in Space,” “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “Star Wars”, they all whispered promises of adventure and of a human spirit reaching beyond the stars. Even Flash Gordon seemed a likely vision for our collective fates. Yet here we are, in the year 2015, and I’m sitting at home, nowhere near the stars, barely near the microwave without fear of overheating something.

It’s been forty-some years since my father passed, and I can’t help but ponder how much progress he missed. Sure, there are some improvements he might have admired, like Tennessee getting its own NFL franchise, he always had a soft spot for football, bless his heart.

On the one hand, some things remain as constant as the north star, Saturday Night Live is still going, and Bob Dylan is still around to confuse and inspire us. But, on the other, the world has changed more than we could have guessed. Who would have imagined we’d be growing human organs in test tubes, making videos from Mars, or watching a reality show about wizards named Oz who give spiritual guidance to housewives? 

Now, our TV’s play videos of masked criminals assaulting people on camera, in front of police officers, hauling off the victim’s property, and the police do nothing. People are banned from smoking cigarettes in a building but folks smoke weed wherever they want. Mind officially blown. 

All that progress, and still no jet packs.

Sometimes, I feel like the world is playing one long, elaborate prank. Like I’m getting punk’ed but I’m never allowed in on the joke. As I sit here, living with the consequences of gravity and time, aching joints, and absent our promised pièce de ré·sis·tance from George Jetson. Where the hell is my jet pack? I guess that’s the sentiment of a whole generation: we thought we’d be sky-bound, flyin’ ’round drunk, getting FUI’s, but instead, we’re earthbound, hobbling down grocery aisles and shaking our fists at a future that never came.