Columnists
Cheers!
Half-past July and finally the rain is falling on the day after my birthday. Today, Sunday the 20th of July, I am one day older and officially an old person. I know I’m old because recently I looked at an empty cardboard box and seriously wondered if it was good enough to keep because “you never know when you’ll need one” or should I just recycle it. It was just an ordinary cardboard box. Gawd knows how I’ll ever be able to part with the partitioned one from the LickBo. That box currently resides in our laundry room or LickBo box purgatory as it is known in our circle. It’s a slippery slope with cardboard boxes. If I close my eyes I can imagine my front hall filled with good, cardboard boxes. It could easily happen. I couldn’t be called “a hoarder” but you never know. And, while I’m officially admitting to being old, what’s with my sudden, intense fascination with the birds in my yard? Oh, I’ve had bird feeders for several years and I’ve always been able to identify a Robin and a Blue Jay and a Cardinal but a Nuthatch! I now know a Nuthatch when I see one and I’m not tricked into thinking it might be a Chickadee. Heck, I’ve even got a bird book. It’s a guide to backyard birds in Ontario. Oh, I know there’s other signs because our kids point them out and now our grandkids are noticing “the oldness”. Youngest grandkid asked how old I was and I told him. He then said, “Maybe I’ll just put seven candles on your cake because there’s only twenty-four in the box.” He also offered to help me blow out the birthday candles because, well you know – old people and shortness of breath. Maybe he just wanted to blow out the candles. I wonder. Later in the day he asked if I was too old to help him bring toys down from the playroom. I’ve helped bring toys down a least one hundred times but on my birthday I was suddenly too old to help. Then the wee toot twisted the little plastic knife a bit more by telling me I couldn’t sleep in the tent because I’d be afraid of the night noises. He, of course, got to sleep in the tent in the backyard on my birthday with his Momma who, apparently, isn’t very old at all. Birthdays can age a person! Grandkids just highlight the obvious.
Aside from the obvious signs of my dotage, a couple of Gym Sisters, P & L, “pssst’d” me over and suggested I should write a column about making lists because old people need lists to remind themselves to do stuff. They and I had a wee laugh about being list makers but how we weren’t exactly list takers along. Old people, like me, make lists for the grocery store then leave the list on the kitchen counter and find ourselves wandering around the shops trying to visualize what might be on that list – the one we left on the kitchen counter. Once I found a “grocery list” in my wallet, was relieved I’d remembered to bring the list and didn’t know there was a problem until I got to the item “stocking stuffers for the grands”. How long has that list been in my wallet? Like I said, I am a list maker. Maybe I made lists in anticipation of being elderly. Whatever, I always have been a list maker. I make lists for grocery shopping. I make lists for camping trips. I make lists for all of the trips. I make lists for holiday meals. I make lists of hardware needed for projects and lists of books I want to read. I have a list of songs to put on my “elderly iPod”, my new gym playlist. It’s been on my Drive for about three months. It seems I’m great at making a list and even better at leaving the list behind or not being able to find it when I get to where I need the list or just ignoring the list. It’s not really getting worse because I’ve always made and forgotten lists. So, I can’t rightly say it’s age-related in my case.
Anyhow, cheers to being elderly. Cheers to adding extra protein to my day. Cheers to functional fitness. Cheers to making sure my meals have extra fibre. Cheers to the vitamin supplement list in my backpack. Cheers to my travel bucket list. And, most especially, Cheers to LOML who has been on my list for sixty years.
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