Learning about old-age phenomenon

By Alan Linda | The Daily Journal

Published Tuesday, November 27, 2007

I’ve decided to devote this column to old age, a phenomenon with which I am steadily acquiring bits and pieces of information. As a phenomenon, aging has certain undesirable details, all of which pale when compared to the alternative.

There seem to be body parts now becoming devoted to prediction and confirmation. The predicting ones deal with the weather, in the form of aches and pains which forecast at the least a weather change in the offing, and at the most a certain “get the hell to the basement, a blue norther is coming!”

It’s the shoulder that has developed the most skill at this, even though I’m pretty certain that it hasn’t a clue what a “blue norther” is. Some years ago, when I was younger than I am now but much older than I was when I was little, I was driving down I35 south of the Cities. Up ahead was one of those small but perfectly developed dark blue weather formations, right where I was headed. There was sun to the west of it, and clear sky to the east. It hovered right over my path going south. My shoulder began to ache. Then it began to throb.

It got worse. I put my right hand in my lap and considered fabricating some kind of splint. The pain was insidious, and were it not for the fact it was the right shoulder, I would have admitted myself to the emergency ward of the nearest hospital as a possible cardiac patient. The cloud got closer, and darker. The shoulder now echoed my heart, and each throb was like someone beating it with a two by four.

Suddenly, I was in heavy rain. It drummed on the car for perhaps a mile or so, during which I slowed to a crawl and hoped I stayed on the road.

Which I did. As suddenly as the rain cloud had started, it stopped, and it was only after the initial relief of having survived this aggressive little outburst that I realized the shoulder had completely stopped aching. Completely.

Had I listened to my shoulder, I could have avoided what was truly a fist-clenching few moments of pure catastrophe looking for a place to happen.

I guess there are a bunch of little air cushions inside the shoulder called bursars, and when the barometric pressure drops, they expand and place pressure on nerves and old injuries. At this point in my life, I’m trying to calibrate this shoulder to do something more useful, like predict when the fish are biting, or people are grumpy. Maybe with time, it would predict the stock market.

Another thing about age is that I now open the paper and for the first time notice the page of births and deaths. The births seem fortunate to me now, in that there seem to be replacements coming along for those of us who have left.

“Oh look,” I say to myself as I see the epitaphs, “there’s someone who lived longer than I am now.” So there is hope for me, apparently. Good news comes in different ways to different people, I guess.

Or, I say to myself, “Look. There’s someone I’ve already outlived,” at which point I go get a dish of ice cream and some cake and reward myself. Reinforcing this behavior is no different, I figure, than reinforcing good behavior in children. At this rate, given enough cake and ice cream, I should be good to reach a hundred.

At the beginning, there was mention of predictive bodily behavior—as in there’s a storm coming—and confirmation bodily behavior. Confirmation is when you’ve just split a bunch of wood with a six-pound maul and you wake up the next morning and your back tells you: “What did you think you were doing?”

Value-wise, the confirmation thing bears more of a resemblance to vengeance than to accurate data analysis. In other words, at this age, it seems to have the sole purpose of punishing you sufficiently to make sure you avoid this foolish behavior in the future, or there won’t be many more trips to the refrigerator for cake and ice cream.

Contrary to the above mentioned aspects of aging, which all seem to be pushing for a longer life, forgetfulness comes along with the apparent goal of causing so much confusion that one loses track of the hundred-year goal.

Two weeks after your back straightens out and you can once again look other people in the eye, you see your six-pound wood splitting maul leaning there against the wood pile, and you go at it again, with the same predicted result—back surrender.

On the other hand, you get to the refrigerator and cannot remember that you came for the ice cream and cake. The alzheimer’s diet.

Alan Linda writes from his home in New York Mills.