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It’s complicated
I always figured when I got older things would become less complicated. In some respects “things” did become easier to handle. I don’t have any debts. I don’t have to get up in the morning and go to work. I’m not worried about driving a Rolls-Can- Hardly—and I’ve driven many of those. Old Age Security and Canada Pension money lands in my bank account once each month. If I shop in the local drug store on Tuesday I get a Senior’s Discount. Sometimes younger people feel sorry for me and hold the door when I’m heading into a retail outlet. If I ask for help to rake the leaves or shovel the snow or mow the lawn, a young friend of ours jumps in and assists. Sometimes he just does one of those jobs without being asked (and, yes we pay him). No one expects me to look “put together” all the time. I never did look put together, but at least people don’t expect it now. In other respects “things” didn’t uncomplicate themselves. Let me say this about that, if you happen to be a younger person and you think older people have it “made in the shade”, we don’t. Oh, it was great for a while, and then things started to go downhill. Getting old isn’t for the faint of heart. If you haven’t developed a whole lot of spine, a sense of humour and gumption by the time you hit your seventies, you’re in for a big surprise. Every day, although not promised, can be a challenge physically, mentally and financially.
Let’s just say as a person ages their “parts” begin to wear out. Any, and all, of the body parts are not under warranty. They never were, but they used to be fairly new. These days we’re dealing with someone’s arthritic knee and the replacement of someone’s old, old, old dental fillings. The arthritic knee isn’t an especially expensive adventure yet, but I have been to the pharmacy several times to find something that will help someone with his “bum knee”. The cost of OTCs adds up and, let’s just say, they aren’t tax deductible. Is it any wonder people ask their doctors (if they have one) for prescriptions? I have been at least three trips for anti-inflammatories, pain relievers, a cream that makes a knee feel chilled, a cream that makes a knee feel hot, along with natural remedies and who knows, maybe a cane or a knee wrap will be on the shopping list in the nottoo- distant future. Did I mention the dental procedures aren’t cheap. Why isn’t dental covered by OHIP? When the fillings were done we were young, we were working and both of us had insurance coverage from our places of work. Now we’re old farts with old technology in our gobs and that old stuff is a bit like masonry. Eventually it crumbles, or breaks and needs to be replaced. I’m not a fan of sitting in any kind of chair for any length of time, but I have had one appointment and one more to go and it could get ugly. Yep, I have one more expensive appointment to fix broken stuff. On top of the knees and the dental work, we’re trying to eat properly/healthfully and that, my friends, isn’t exactly cheap either.
So, here we are, LOML and I are looking down the double barrel of things we have to deal with as we age. Things that aren’t all about the travelling, the gourmet meals and the nights out on-the-town. Oh, we travel, but not nearly as often as we’d like to and now that someone has a “bumknee” the part of travel I enjoy the most— walking and hiking—are mostly off the itinerary. Gourmet meals out? Sure, we do that once in a while, but by the time we decide where we’re going to go for a “gourmet meal” we’ve decided we’re too tired or too achy to go out and neither of us likes to drive after dark. So, that’s a thing, driving after dark. We don’t have night vision problems, we just don’t like going out after the sunsets. Honestly, I don’t like the thought of having a great meal without a glass of wine, or two. But who needs to be on the road, after dark, with a couple of glasses of wine under their belt and likely indigestion from eating things our older, more delicate constitutions can’t always handle? Have you ever been brought down by a steak with blue cheese and a side of garlic mashed? It isn’t pretty, folks. We used to be able to handle our dinners out. Now if we want to enjoy a meal like that we have to make sure we’ve got a room in the hotel across the street, a bottle of Pepto and all of our prescriptions.
Yeah, this is the part of my life where I was going to be the vivacious granny with the hip-grandpa, and here we are. I’m still the vivacious granny (that’s what he said) and he’s still the hip-grandpa (that’s what she said) but we’re complicated. Our lives are complicated. Getting older is complicated. It’s a good thing we had children and the children have children, it helps us to forget about being”complicated”. Every once in a while the children and their children show up and slyly look around the house to see if LOML and I are coping.
We’re coping just fine, but it’s complicated.
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