Ten Advantages to Becoming an Old Coot

I have attained my grandfatherly years honestly. I will admit I had hoped for a few more grandchildren than I wound up with, but my children have stubbornly refused to reproduce in the quantities I had in mind. I gave up my armada of boats, my ton of fishing gear, my sporting goods bag (in case a ball game broke out among my 18 grandchildren that, sadly, never materialized), my scuba diving equipment, my train sets, most of my game collection and all but a few of my young people oriented book collection (even "Mike Mulligan & His Steam Shovel" was passed along to the one grandkid we've determined to spoil rotten).  I have two grandsons, one of whom is 2300 miles away is adopted and whom I love like one of my own children and visit weekly by Skype. My other grandson currently lives in Tennessee and moves around a lot, I've never met him and have only made tentative contact with him through Facebook recently so we don't know how that will go yet. 

 

So my dream gig as the fun grandpa has been abridged significantly. I had a fleet of canoes and equipment all ready to lead family floats down the mighty (and fairly safe) rivers of Texas. I even trained as a Red Cross swimming and canoeing instructor. Man I was ready. Oh well. "The best laid plans o' mice and men oft times gang agly" as Scottish poet Bobby Burns once opined.

Still there are some definite advantages to becoming an old geezer and a few disadvantages like arthritis to make you appreciate the good bits.  So let me list the good stuff that comes with being an old coot.

1. People don't expect you to dig ditches. It surprises them if you do pick up a shovel and they are appreciative since they didn't think you were going to help. AND they keep offering you drinks and asking you if you need to sit down for a minute.
2. Your children and their spouses ask you if you want to take a nap and think it's funny when you snore. You actually win points with your offspring, your spouse and your various descendants when you pile up in the recliner for an afternoon snooze.
3. You finally have accumulated an assortment of favorite things that don't get thrown out by your significant other because either they are ugly or you don't need them. By the time you are eligible for social security you own some things like mugs, recliners, fishing gear, Hawaiian shirts, and books that your wife tolerates and won't slip into the Goodwill donation box when you aren't looking. Figuring out what you can keep is a process of elimination.
4. Arthritis is a great excuse for avoiding unpleasant tasks. Conversely, when you actually get around to doing one of those honey-do projects, you get a brief respite from the admonishment to get-er-done!
5. You have a collection of favorite TV shows you really like. Better still, because you've previewed and selected the good stuff you enjoy, you don't have to wade through the depressing post-modernist crap your kids and grandkids think is relevant. 
6. You have a favorite music collection that is wonderfully eclectic. I've got more than 500 songs in my phone's mp3 list and a pile of CDs, cassettes and vinyl that I'm gradually converting to digital mp3s. I defy anyone to look at my digital collection and find a bad song or at least one I don't like. I've got every thing from Pearly Shells (Don Ho) to Dead Skunk in the Middle of the Road, from Doris Day to The First Highlanders Pipe Band playing Amazing Grace, from I'm My Own Grandpa to Brown-Eyed Girl, from Monkees, Beach Boys and Beatles to Placido Domingo, John Denver, Earl Scruggs, Burl Ives and Audio Adrenalin. My personal radio station never plays a song I don't want to hear or interrupt the music with a commercial for Honest Bob Vanderhoort's Used Cars.
7. You can sit on the back porch in the sun for 4 hours and it feels like you had a productive afternoon.  It is no longer necessary to tick off a list of things you need to meet your life goals. Sitting on the back porch playing your guitar and feeding the squirrels in the sunshine WAS one of your life goals.
8. You know how to do stuff that makes you happy. You play the guitar, banjo, dulcimer or Irish bodhrain, You build model ships. You can make your own bookshelves. You have time to write that novel you always wanted to write. You can cook things you want to eat and you're pretty good at it because you have lots of practice.
9. People no longer ask you to help them move. You can go over if you want, but you are participating in more of a supervisory role because you have a lot of experience in how to move and pack having done so many many times in your life.
10. Little things give you immense satisfaction.  A favorite restaurant, a walk down a country lane, a grandkid coming to visit, birds coming to your bird feeder outside your window and you can watch them from your easy chair. You, in fact, have an easy chair and people save it for you. 

There are other things I'm sure, but I just can't remember them now. In fact, people don't expect you to get ten things pulled from memory in the first place, so when you do, you get credit for being kind of old, but still sharp as a tack.

Time for my obligatory Sabbath afternoon nap.

© 2021 by Tom King

 

 

 

Top Ten Signs You're Getting Old

Age sneaks up on you and pretty soon you're doing stuff you SWORE you'd never ever do in your life. Here are some early warning signs that decrepitude is approaching:

1. You don't have to set your alarm clock anymore, unless you want to make sure you don't get up so early that your grandkids think you must have been a dairy farmer once.

2. You choose movies to watch that won't disturb your nap. British period movies are a special favorite, although you find anything with John Wayne or Maureen O'Hara in it to be soothing.

3. You have a favorite movie that you've never seen the end of.  And that's part of the reason you like it so well.

4. You wear black knee socks with shorts - not because you think its fashionable, but because it hurts too much to bend over and take them off. I mean getting a pair of shorts on is tough enough. Who has the energy left to change your socks?

5. You drop things a lot less often, because it's too danged hard to get down on your knees to pick them back up again. Before picking anything up you look around for some kind of long-handled tool. If you haven't bought a grabber yet, you've had one in the shopping cart at least once but were too cheap to buy it.

6. You park out on the far side of the grocery store parking lot in order to (a) protect your car from dents caused by people parking next to you and (b) because the extra walk is part of your plan to get "back in shape".

7. Your memory is so far gone that you actually believe that you were once "in shape". Your stories about the days when you were in shape are the stuff of legend (or more accurately - mythology).  Joseph Campbell once interviewed you for a book he was writing.

8. At least one day a month, you never get around to changing out of your pajamas. Either that or you slept in your clothes. Either that or you wear the same clothes all the time.

9. You realize that you are probably never going to get around to writing the Great American Novel and that not paying attention in high school English probably didn't hurt your career that much or if it did, you really don't care anymore.

10. You develop a sudden interest in the surgical arts - as practiced upon yourself and your friends. You find yourself discussing colonoscopies over meals at four-star restaurants.

The bad news is that it gets worse from here on. When someone suggests going to a monthly bingo game at 6:00 am down at the McDonald's in the Walmart Supercenter, and you think it "sounds like fun", you will have officially topped the hill and begun the long slide down into geezerdom.

The good news? You've lived long enough to become a problem for your children, which is sort of payback for all the misery they caused for you when they were kids. They'll be having that "meeting" down at the I-Hop one day soon to figure out what to do with you. You will not be invited and your suggestions will not be seriously considered.

Smile and go with it (but put in your dentures first; the gums are just not attractive, okay).

(c) 2004 by Tom King