No matter how much stretching I do or healthy breakfasts I eat… I’ll never feel twenty ever again
Or thirty or even forty.
I read an article before I went to bed last night. It talked about a theory called the U-shape curve.
Man’s happiness starts to decline after the age of eighteen. The decline hits the lowest peak just before the age of fifty and then starts to climb back up.
Once a guy hits his thirties and forties he starts to feel older at a quicker pace. Muscles are sore longer after a workout. Hangovers have longer recovery periods and the juices of youth are slowly draining away.
Then the Big 5-0 comes around and we don’t remember what it’s like to feel young anymore. It’s been years since the decline began and we are content with the aging process.
We are all aging and mortality is becoming more difficult to deal with.
I remember telling my dad a story on a Saturday morning when we went out for breakfast.
I was about twenty-eight and my dad was the age that I am today in 2024.
I went to Gossage Grill after a night in the Forest Park bars with the guys. A group of Trinity girls walked into the diner and one of the girls walked up to me and said, "Sir, do you know what time it is right now?”
“Yes, it’s two twenty-seven.”
I can still remember looking at my watch and seeing that it was almost two-thirty in the morning and these high school girls were still out.
That was when I told my dad how old I felt. How a seventeen year old kid calling me sir made me feel like an old timer.
My dad replied at the end of my story, “Finish your Mickey-Mouse pancakes Grampa, we have errands to run.”
First of all I wasn’t eating pancakes shaped like the Disney Mouse. I was having a Denver omelette.
As we left the restaurant my Oldman turned to me and asked me if I needed a walker or a cane.
Now I’m the Oldman and the first thing I thought about was.
Jeez, that Trinity Chick is probably fifty by now. Probably a hot mom!
Age doesn’t escape anyone. The Oldman is in heaven. The restaurant in Oak Park closed over the summer. Gossage Grill has been closed for years. I go out with that group of guys once a year before Christmas. I’m a divorced dad trying to stretch his big body on a Monday morning and I wonder if that Trinity girl kept her school uniform?!?!?!
It’s Monday the last day of September and the last day of the quarter.
It’s going to be a gorgeous day to be astonished. The sun has a smile and YOU have a kick in your step.
Dad? I’m not going to need that cane just yet….
