YOU CAN'T STOP PROGRESS

Blog number 507******* 14 April 2011

He was once quite handsome. He was once what you would call a hunk. He was once the darling of those with female pulchitude. Not any more and not for some time.

Now he's got scraggly thinning hair, wrinkled arms where once boasted rippling muscles. Beautiful white teeth?  Oh, no.  Yellow.

And the whole upper right quadrant of his dentures is missing. Not that he gets any break on having his teeth cleaned because of that. One forth the teeth, one forth the price. Right?

Wrong.

And his body - it sags. His vision was once that of a sharpshooter. Now? Not so much. His strength? All gone.

If he happens to find himself lying on the floor for any reason, he has to exert tremendous effort, gathering all his strength in order to get himself up on his hands and knees and from there make a final heroic push to stand upright once again. This is the only exercise he allows himself.

That this is only occasional and accidental bothers him not a whit.


He dresses like a curmudgeon because that's what he is. It is after all, the clothes that make the man.

His hobbies are solving jigsaw puzzles, reading and napping. Long walks are limited to the mailbox and back, taken slowly.

He listens to music whenever he can do so without his loving wife noticing what he is doing.

She will not allow him the use of the piano because he is sometimes wacko. Cannot be trusted around music, evidently.

He no longer dances.

And his memory. Ah yes. Long past its prime. But he doesn't care. Mostly nonsense anyhow. His memory has been replaced by fantasy.

He thinks he traded up.

This gentleman we are talking about is today, for the first time in this life, eighty years old.

MADE IT!