It's not the wrinkles that bother me

There is no such thing as aging gracefully.  We get old, and that's it.  Only old people claim they are aging gracefully.  The rest of us see it as a slow decay leading to life's inevitable conclusion.  

There isn't a dang thing graceful about that.  A quiet acceptance and gradual fading is all that's left.  The memory of you might last through your grandchildren, but those memories, too, fade until it's as if you never existed at all.

Can you tell I'm at the quiet acceptance stage of life?  One of my grandkids is off to college already.  The youngest ones are almost there.  My oldest grandchild is about to make me a great-granddad.  I tell her not to do it until I'm gone.  She'll do it, probably just to spite me anyway.

I tell myself I look better than most guys my age, but I'm only fooling myself.  Now when I look into the mirror, I see the decay.  I knew it was coming; it comes as no surprise.  An entire vitamin store and several aisles of anti-aging armaments available from several different department stores are fighting a losing battle against time.  Even AI is clueless how to battle it.

No lie.  I asked AI how can I stop aging.  It's bright answer?  Make lots of friends and have lots of sex.  Heck, that was my philosophy of life when I was in my late teens through twenties.  I aged anyway.

I slather stuff on my face that's supposed to make me look younger, and I take every letter of the alphabet as daily vitamin supplements.  I should ask for my money back.  

But it's not the wrinkles etching my face, or thinning, sagging skin dragging my eyes down in a tired and worn out expression, or my relative social isolation and lack of sex compared to my younger days that bothers me. 

It's the loss of magic.

From my earliest memories, magic filled the world.  One summer, I was about seven or eight, I believed I could fly like a bird.  I believed I could and believed that if I tried hard enough, I would.  Mom and Dad told me if I tried hard enough in school, I would get good grades.  I did get good grades.  This time I would try hard and fly.  If the birds and the bees could fly, why couldn't I?

I started jumping from the third rung of a ladder.  My feet plopped squarely on the ground.  But I was determined.  I worked my way up to the fifth rung.  I could've have sworn I felt a slight lift before my feet plopped solidly on the ground.  Five rungs simply wasn't a high enough start.  I had to go higher, but there were no more rungs to climb.

Fortunately, my younger sister, who was trying as hard as me to fly, talked me out of using the ladder to get on the roof.  A little bit of magic was erased from my world that day.  I gave up trying to fly by flapping my arms like a bird, and accepted trying harder wouldn't make me fly at all.

The next summer I decided I wanted to be a little elf, about an inch high.  I could wander through the lawn as if I were on a tropical safari battling monsters, like giant ants and venomous, eight-legged monstrosities that were no longer harmless little spiders.  Needless to say, I didn't achieve my small, warrior/explorer stature.  

By the time I graduated high school, I regretted my efforts to try to be an inch tall ten years earlier.  I tried so hard to be an inch tall back then, I failed to grow to six foot two inches like my Dad when I hit eighteen.

Ok, I knew at eighteen, like I know now, my five foot Mom, who is really four foot eleven, is to blame for my less than six foot height.  Genetics erased more magic out of my world.  But I had a whole new set of magic filling it.  And more realistic magic, not child-like magical magic.

No one forgets their first kiss.  The first kiss makes jumping off a ladder, flapping your arms, and trying to fly look like foolish child's play doomed for failure.  That first kiss makes you soar like an albatross.  For the next few days, my feet never even touched the ground.  Magic at its best had to be wrapped in the first kiss, the kiss that gives you wings.

While that first kiss is magical all in itself, other kisses don't quite measure up.  Let's face it.  Very few people, if any, remember their second kiss.  Or third.  Or the 99,999th.

But that first kiss keeps you aloft for quite a few decades.  New magic, adult magic, was to be found and explored.  College classrooms to learn and college fun to romp in.  A soulmate to find and a family to raise.  A career to build and a world to change.

And then one day, the albatross gets tired and needs to land.  Gravity and time has taken its toll.  He looks up to the sky and thinks, "Been there; done that."  

"But," he thinks, "I haven't been to the other side of that sand dune.  Perhaps what I've been looking for lies on the other side."

Yes, my body might slow down, but my brain hasn't.  I might be more wrinkled and moving more slowly, but my brain is as sharp as when I was a kid jumping off a ladder.  As long as my brain seeks the magic in life, no matter how small or how large, the wrinkles don't bother me.

The day my brain forgets the magic all around me or can't imagine the magic yet to be found, that is what bothers me.

That, and the fact I'll never experience a first kiss again.

For your listening pleasure:

Posted by One Drunk Redneck