Didn't My Skin Used to Fit? (14 page)

Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.
—Mark Twain

46
What’d You Say?

My husband suffered some hearing damage in his years of service with the Los Angeles Police Department. Today officers are required to wear ear protectors while qualifying with their service revolver. That wasn’t the case when my husband joined the department, so the monthly visits to the firing range took their toll, and now he’s paying for it.

High-pitched sounds are what give him the most trouble, especially background noises at restaurants and women’s voices. Even with hearing damage, though, he refuses to get a hearing aid. I don’t understand this thinking, but he’s not alone. A lot of people think a hearing aid will make them look older than they want to look. Frankly, I don’t get it. Does answering the question ‘‘Did the mail come?’’ with ‘‘No, I didn’t see the cow’’ really make a person look younger?

Though my husband’s hearing was damaged years ago, hearing loss is also a side effect of aging. And we don’t only start losing our hearing, but our ears seem to get bigger, too. They continue to grow as we age, some of them even turning outward. Maybe that’s to give us more access for trimming ear hairs?

I’ve found, though, that what most middle-aged and older people suffer most from is selective hearing. They hear what they want to hear. My husband can hear me whisper a Home Shopping Network order into the telephone from two rooms away, but he can’t hear me calling him to dinner.

He can hear the rear fender of my car barely tap the planter as I’m backing out of the driveway—while he’s taking a shower in the house—but he can’t hear the telephone ringing when he’s two feet away from it.

One of these days someone’s going to come out with a chip for hearing aids that would work like the V-chip in a TV. It could be programmed to edit out all the things you don’t want to hear: ‘‘Honey Do’’ lists, mother-in-law visiting plans, and long distance service sales pitches, to name a few. The advantages would be endless.

Until then, if we want to get out of uncomfortable situations, I guess we’ll just have to keep on faking it.

He’s so old that when he orders a three-minute egg, they ask him for the money up front.
—Milton Berle

47
Who Unplugged the Fountain of Youth?

People have searched for it for years, and in case you’re one of those still looking for it, I’m sorry to inform you that there is no fountain of youth. There is no pool of magical water where you can go for a dip and regain your youthful vitality. There are no water springs that will grant sharper memory or tighter skin. And if there were such a place, we wouldn’t be able to get near it anyway. Can you imagine the parking problems?

No matter how badly we may want our youth to return, it’s not coming back. Oh, we can snip a little here or tape a little back there, successfully taking a decade or so off our appearance, but we’re not fooling Mother Nature. Once spent, youth can’t be recaptured. We only get one dip in it, one go-around. Fountains of youth and time machines make interesting books and movies, but they are purely fictional.

I’m not so sure a fountain of youth would be a good idea anyway. Would we really want a world in which no one grew old? What kind of an existence would it be where we were all eternally adolescent? After a while we’d get tired of the childish games and rock music. We’d long for more variety, more substance, and some of the wisdom that only comes with age.

I once attended a church that had a young pastor and only a handful of older members. There was plenty of youthful energy there, but something important was missing. I like to call it the ‘‘been-there-survived-that mentality.’’ I don’t know about you, but I appreciate it when I’m going through a difficult time and an older adult shares with me that she, too, went through a similar difficulty and made it to the other side. It gives me hope.

So don’t waste your time searching for the fountain of youth. Youthfulness isn’t what you’re seeking anyway, it’s usefulness, and that isn’t found in a fountain. It’s only found within yourself.

The minute you settle for less than you deserve, you get even less than you settled for.
—Maureen David

48
Evading the Obvious

I once attended a memorial service in which the person delivering the eulogy did everything she could to avoid saying the word ‘‘dead.’’ She used words like ‘‘departed, passed on, no longer with us, away, on the other side, gone to a better place, at peace, at rest, sleeping, walking with the angels’’—well, you get the idea.

Most of us are uncomfortable talking about death. It’s not something we put on our list of New Year’s resolutions of things we want to do. We realize it’s a natural part of the life cycle, but we don’t like to dwell on it.

As we get older, though, the concept of death becomes harder and harder to ignore. We’ve attended far more funerals than we would have liked, and the fact that life has no guarantees is a truth that always seems to be slapping us in the face.

We may have even experienced a few brushes with death. My first close call came when I was only three months old. It was Christmas Eve, and my family had just left my uncle’s house, heading for our home just a few miles away. While stopped at an intersection, we were struck head on by a drunk driver and knocked off the road and down an embankment.

Our car was totaled, and our injuries ranged from my father’s critical condition to broken bones and bruises for most of the rest of us. One of those broken bones happened to be my arm. I easily could have been killed, though. But obviously God had a different plan for my life.

Then on a youth retreat as a teenager, I nearly drowned while playing underwater tag with our youth pastor. I didn’t know how to swim, so every time he’d dive under the water to grab me, I’d take refuge by standing on his back. This seemed like a good idea to me at the time, but he was of a different opinion. Something about needing to breathe. Each time I stood on his back, he’d carry me for as long as he could, then finally knock me off so he could—breathe.

Once when he knocked me off, though, we were in nine feet of water, and down I went. I could hear voices laughing and talking in the background, but no one seemed to notice I was drowning. All I could do was pray and try not to open my mouth while doing so. The only parts of my body I could raise out of the water were my hands. I tried waving them, but still no one noticed my plight.

On my fourth attempt to rise to the surface, no part of my body cleared the water. That was when I began to accept the fact that it was over. I wasn’t happy about it, mind you. Drowning was not on the list of retreat activities. But there wasn’t a thing I could do to help myself.

Finally, someone yelled, ‘‘Hey, look, she’s drowning!’’ From the moment I heard those words, I knew everything was going to be OK. I was still sinking like a rock in nine feet of water, but I now had hope.

Our youth pastor swam over to me and pulled me up and to the side of the pool, thus saving my life. I easily could have drowned that day. But God had a different plan for my life.

In the years that have followed, I’ve had other brushes with death. I’m sure you could relate some of your own. Arriving at an intersection four seconds earlier, you might have been hit by that car running the red light. Taking a closer look at the prescription spared you from swallowing someone else’s medication.

Each of us may have missed death hundreds of times without even being aware of it.

Only God knows precisely how much time he’s assigned us. There’s no drop-in company in heaven. We’re not going to get there a day sooner than he’s expecting us. So whether we’ve been given forty-five years or ninety, it’s up to us not to waste a single second of it.

Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.
—Thomas A. Edison

49
And Another Thing . . .

A character’s dying words are usually pretty moving—in the movies. Their lines have been brilliantly scripted by a screenwriter. They are concise yet poignant. There’s no redundancy or bad grammar. You won’t hear any clichés uttered on a deathbed on the big screen. The writer will give his character something memorable to say, something that will put the audience in awe of his wisdom at such a time.

It doesn’t always happen that way in real life, though. Most of us don’t wax eloquent when we’re taking that final breath. On his deathbed, H. G. Wells uttered these memorable last words: ‘‘Go away. I’m all right.’’ Pancho Villa was even less prepared for his final sentiment. He said, ‘‘Don’t let it end like this. Tell them I said something.’’ Convicted murderer James Rodgers had a little more time to think about what he would say before his death. When asked for his final request before facing the firing squad, he said, ‘‘Why, yes—a bulletproof vest.’’

Dying people have left us with brilliant insights as to the meaning of life. They’ve used their final words to reconcile broken relationships not only with people but also with their God. They’ve even used their last breath to utter revisions to their will, especially if their beloved beneficiary is standing at their bedside with a date.

When it comes time for me to utter my last words, I’m afraid I won’t be able to do it. As a writer, I know I’m going to keep wanting to do a rewrite. I can hear myself now: ‘‘Take time to stop and smell the roses.’’ Too cliché. ‘‘I regret that I have but one life to give for my cooking.’’ No good either. That would force an investigation into my refrigerator and perhaps even an autopsy. ‘‘Life—live it, love it, give back to it.’’ Ummm . . . now that has some promise. But with my luck, when that time comes there won’t be a single pen in the house.

I am a part of all that I have met.
—Lord Alfred Tennyson

50
Priorities

A lot of what we allow to consume our time and energy isn’t really important, at least not in the big picture. So just in case we ever question whether or not something is worth all the attention we’re giving it, the following chart is provided: