KVETCH I

Playing in the Fourth Quarter: epistles to aging cousins

Kvetch I (Kvetch can denote a relatively beneficent complaint, a
complainer or even can be used as a nontransitive verb ... to complain
... Typically all spoken with a Central European accent)

My youngest child, L, was visiting with her husband and their three
daughters ... the oldest is a kind-of 19th Century 12 year old and her
identical twin 7 year old sisters have 21st Century gusto. My daughter
is against the title of these musings that I have committed to writing
over the next two years. She imagines that at 60+, her father is better
described as playing in the Last Half ....

I get the same out in the world. I try to run every day ... whever, at least, that my
cardiac-electrical system isn’t sending conflicting messages as to when
and how often my heart should beat. “Still my heart” .... indeed ...
more about that, later.

I was checking out of the Gym with Marsha who
agreed to marry me ... we did so in 1965 ... (“checking out with
Marsha?” I see what my daughter sees as my pessimism) ... A 60’ish lady
at the counter asked how I was doing. How was I doing? I had just run
3.5 miles on a conveyor-belt-hamster-wheel contraption ... In a typical
year I run the equivalent of Philadelphia to Miami on a treadmill and
maybe I run outside the equal of Philadelphia to Toledo (I have fond
memories of planting my first Vegetable gardens in our yard in Toledo
from 1954-1956). My shirt, at the counter of the gym, held memories of
a 10k I ran in 2005 and about a quart of sweat that followed the
pattern of my lungs from this day’s run.

How was I doing? It’s interesting to me that young people (and Marsha)
often think that I don’t hear so well. Truth be told, I hear just fine
but it takes a few extra seconds to process the words inside my head.
“How are you doing?” she repeated. I thought: I could respond with a
cavalier “pretty good” .... or I could push it and say “Grrrrreat” ...
like I had just eaten Frosted Flakes (which I don’t eat because of all
the refined carbs and the wheat). I decided that one 60+ to another
might choose to answer honestly. “I’m feeling a little old, today.”

What a mistake! It was like the time I told a friend that I was very
happy and a touch sad at my kid’s wedding in 1997. “You can’t feel that
way.” The friend had said that I couldn’t feel that way because it was a day
just for happiness. The counter lady at the gym said I must feel my
youth and Grrrreat. Ah, Geez.

Thismay be why I’m writing. Look. If you’re not pushing 60 or greater,
interested in what it might be like someday to be Emeritus in AARP or
if you think that there is no place for sadness, fatigue, pain, glee or
energy in the Fourth Quarter, feel free to change the channel and go
read Ingenue or Boys Life or Playboy.

It is my intention to chronicle facets of the lives of folk over 60 ...
. Mine and others .... Back, soon.

I must have been thinking about this for a long time. In 1994, I wrote
about my acquaintance with getting on in years – though I was not quite
50:



10 July 1994
Witnesses

On the bottom of his closet, like two soldiers they stood
A layer of dust demanded “You’ve seen these before”.
Witnesses for what he now couldn’t and once could
When he bought them.
Was it nineteen sixty four?

One at a time, he picked each up, turned it around,
“Look! The pattern on the toes is just the same,
The leather’s still good, the color still brown,
And inside
The author hadn’t changed his name.

Yet they spoke of different times and of a different man
Who wore them then more than a quarter century ago.
These shoes were now witnesses to god’s sinister plan,
That from vibrant forms,
Takes man and transforms him to Lore.


I expect there’ll be happier writings, too. The future unfolds and --
with a degree of faith -- we greet it.