It doesn't make sense. But there it is, heads again.

When I was five years old, I was at my grandmother's house watching Friday Night Fights when the most unbearable pain of my young life shot down my legs and I started screaming.  It was an acute attack of rheumatic fever that sent me to the emergency room and ruined the bout between Gene Fullmer and Sugar Ray Robinson.  I spent the next year in a bed overlooking the yard between my grandmother's Victorian and my parents' little Lustron home next door.

Some sixty years later, Katherine and I were walking back from breakfast at Estelle's in San Pedro when I dislocated the big toe on my left foot.  San Pedro on Ambergris Caye in Belize is the kind of a place where if you are wearing a shirt and shoes you are overdressed, so I was barefoot on the beach and stubbed my toe on a piece of concrete jutting out from a place it had no business being.  I think I made it through the rest of our stay in San Pedro without letting my toe put too much of a damper on things, but my left foot up until that moment was my best body part and I was bummed.  Now it is permanently marred by my displaced toe (If you look carefully, you will notice that my formerly straight and symmetrical great toe now slants at a slight angle to the left.).

In the six decades between those two incidents, nothing of consequence has gone wrong with me.  Oh, there was the time I bloodied my nose falling down on the trail to Lake Solitude, but other than having a bulbous nose for the duration of our vacation, it wasn't particularly traumatic.

All those people carping about the cost of health insurance should take note.  I have been paying big bucks for more than forty years and I've never been able to cash in, so to speak.  But am I mad?  Never.  Just bemused.

Maybe that is why I look at every new ache and pain, every new symptom, as a harbinger of something awful.  I'm due.

I was going to write a list of symptoms here to illustrate my point, but other than a back that has periodically ached for as long as I can remember and lots of urgent calls to the bathroom, I can't think of anything.

I take that back.  I can thing of one thing.  I'm sixty-eight.

I remember my mother at the same age telling me that besides it being harder to get up off the floor, sixty-eight felt a lot like sixteen.  She still had all the insecurities and hopes and dreams and fears she had when she was a teenager.  My mom could be wise like that and she was exactly right.  I try to project the distinguished older gentleman look, but basically I'm still the same screwed-up kid I was when I was in high school.

It has just been in the last year that I have begun to notice certain physical changes that tell me I'm not sixteen anymore.  Mowing the yard has become more difficult and I can see how I might want to hire some neighbor kid to do the job years (I hope) from now.  I can't hold my liquor as well as I used to.  It takes my muscles longer to recover.  For instance, if I work out on a different machine, or a different weight bench with different angles, I can't move the next day.  I find myself dosing off in front of the television at night (SOMETIMES IN THE AFTERNOON!).  That's something I vowed I would never do.  In fact, I remember telling one of my kids to shoot me if he/she ever saw that happening.

I haven't felt a similar lessening of mental skills.  I'll keep you posted as the degeneration advances.  However, I do have to admit that there are numerous times when I go off on an errand and pull up to the stop light on Wadsworth that I find myself forgetting where I'm headed.  Should I turn left, or right?  Maybe a U-turn?  But that confusion quickly passes and I remember my destination.  I know that happens to everyone and at all ages, but the thing that bothers me is I am more panic-stricken by it than I used to be, wondering if this might be the first sign of my inevitable decline.

I know this sounds silly (another sign?), but it seems like something bad should happen.  It's like at the beginning of "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead."  They're flipping a coin that keeps coming up heads dozens of times in a row.

It just doesn't make sense.  But there it is, heads again.