Getting older

I  don’t quite know what provoked it. I was at home, alone, setting my room in order, looking out the window at my lovely flowering vines, when all at once I thought — I will be turning 65 this year. Suddenly, like the giant from Jack and the Beanstalk, it came and hit me in the solar plexus. I could not breathe. Sixty-five! The age when you retire. When your hair has turned rapidly white. When your face has developed many wrinkles and lines. When it’s hard to remember how you looked when you were 35 and beautiful.

I used to color my own hair but last time I had it trimmed I felt how dry it had become. So I decided not to dye it for a while, meaning I would become a pepper head with some salt, not too much salt, please.

What’s the difference between being 35 and 65? Thirty years and a lot of experience gone through that made the years slip so quickly by. Now I am smarter than most and getting more impatient, too. I am impatient with people who send me those God and Jesus Christ texts on my cell phone, tempted to tell them to stop it. You’re taking the name of the Lord thy God in vain, using it as you do. I stop myself from such impatience. Rude, I advise me. Don’t do it. I am impatient with people who text what they want me to write about but I do not respond. What for? I spare them the sharp lethal edges of my aging impatience.

I go to bed early now. Usually I am asleep by . . . wait, except when I watch Lipstick Jungle and it begins at 10. So that delays my sleep time. Or Crossing Jordan, which ends around midnight. Then I drink a lot of water before bed so even if I do sleep early I wake up two to three times to go to the bathroom. Never mind, I sleep alone, don’t bother anyone. I return to sleep quickly again. Wake up according to what time I went to sleep, always eight hours later. I think if you’ve lived as long as I have, you’ve acquired certain good habits.

I have no problem walking around or sitting down. But I do have a problem getting up from sitting down. It’s my knees. They hurt more if I’ve eaten pork or beef. They feel somewhat gelatinous and I can’t believe, trying to get up from my favored TV chair, that my knees have the texture of jelly and there’s some pain. I hate it, you know, this pain in my knees when getting up from sitting down. I say that because I don’t get it getting up from lying down. Maybe that’s the position I should take the rest of my life — lying down. It certainly is more comfortable.

I live in one of the oldest buildings in Legazpi Village and now, these days, they are finally replacing the elevators. Good news in the end, bad news transitionally. There’s plenty of dust and noise making living there almost unbearable. What’s terrible news is when the one elevator in service breaks down, just refuses to move. It means that I have to climb up nine flights of stairs to get home. It’s okay when you’re going down. Gravity is on your side and pulls you down easily. But going up! I know now I can climb up six flights, an important thing to remember just in case I move. I should not take a unit higher than the fifth floor.

On the sixth floor I sit down on the stairs and catch my breath. I take about 10 to 15 minutes of rest time. I breathe deeply, difficult to do since there’s not much fresh air there, but somehow I manage it. Children coming home from school pass by. I wave them through. Neighbors descend past me, I smile and wave them through. For a few minutes I sit like a Chinese stone dog. Then, finally, with difficulty I pull myself up and climb again. Once I get to my unit, I sit down again for a few minutes until I catch my breath.

It isn’t much fun when you talk to other friends of more or less the same age and you trade early Alzheimer stories. About going to your room, striding purposely, knowing exactly what you’re going to do until you get there. Then you draw a blank. Or searching high and low for your cell phone charger until your cell phone dies and you decide to buy another charger only to find out that the thing that was plugged, that you were convinced was your printer, was your charger. There, under your very nose, it hadn’t moved. Only you had lost your mind. This is particularly no fun at all when your mother has Alzheimer’s and you know it follows you like an invisible cloud waiting to pounce and take over your life like it has your mother’s life and it takes all the strength you can find not to panic.

I’m turning 65 and I hate it. I don’t quite know what provoked it either.