Hello, Dear Readers. It’s good to see you.
At the end of this week, I have a birthday coming up, so getting older and how we think about that has been on my mind lately. It’s a strange thing, for example, that even after an baby is over a year old, we continue to refer to his or her age in terms of months for a while. I don’t know why we do that (and neither does anyone else—I’ve asked around), but personally, I think it’s because it makes the baby seem older. “Eighteen months” just sounds older to me than “a year and half.” It makes the baby seem wiser and more worldly, like someone you would actually trust for stock advice. Of course, I can understand why we drop the use of months after a while. After all, I don’t think I’ve told anyone that I’m going to be 588 months old at the end of the week. That doesn’t make me sound wise and worldly. It makes me sound ancient. In the extreme.
A good friend of mine actually came up with a great way of conceptualizing herself when she turned 45. She said that she preferred to think of herself as three 15 year-olds. Unfortunately, for this birthday, that won’t work. The only thing this birthday will resolve neatly into is seven 7 year-olds, and I’m just not up for having to be that many people at one time. True, I could be my own Brownie troop, but all that means is that I’d be entitled to wear a uniform (well, several uniforms, actually). And that’s just not enough of a draw for me. I had a hard enough time pulling off a Brownie uniform when I actually was a Brownie, and besides, there’s just something about a middle-aged woman in a Brownie uniform that strikes me as perverse, especially when you add on the matching beanie.
So, I’m going back to my old standby of looking at my birthday as an anniversary. I like thinking of it that way because it makes it seem like I married myself and that this year’s 20th anniversary of my 29th birthday denotes some sort of monumental achievement in communication and compromise. It stands as a shining testament to my love and commitment to myself and to my willingness to persevere through all those times when being me was just a big, giant hassle. Anyway, I like the idea of celebrating a birthday as an anniversary. It makes it seem so much more noble than just admitting that I don’t have the ability to prevent time from passing, and besides, it makes people have to do math to figure out how old I really am.
When it comes to getting older, though, I have to admit that I’ve always been intrigued by my parents’ attitudes. My mom is easy to figure out: she just refuses to get old. She’s just not doing it, and that’s the end of that story. My dad is more of a challenge, though.
My father’s side of the family had a strange sort of reverie for old age and infirmity that seemed almost Southern. Of course, they weren’t from the South, which just made it all the more odd, but anyway, that’s the kind of environment my dad was raised in. So, I think there was a part of him when he was younger that just couldn’t wait to get old, but then again, there is a part of him that just never seems to age.
The thing about my father is that he is the undisputed Master of Crazy Ideas and Hare-Brained Schemes, and that is one thing about him that has never changed. One of his earliest ideas that I remember was the front-yard driving range apparatus. We lived in a nice middle-class suburb, and our house was on a corner lot. So, our front yard was bigger than everybody else’s and worked fairly well for practicing hitting golf balls as long as you used wiffle balls. But my dad got tired of hitting wiffles after a while, so he thought up a way to hit a real golf ball. Basically, he got a big, thick square of hard rubber matting, embedded a golf tee in it, and anchored a long, elastic chord to it. He then drilled a hole in a golf ball, ran the chord through it, and secured it on the other end with a bolt. Then one evening, my sisters and I all assembled on the front lawn to witness my dad’s new invention in action.
He took a couple of practice swings and then stepped onto the rubber mat. He took a beautiful swing, and we all watched as the ball sailed out past our yard, across the street, and halfway over our neighbor’s yard. Then the chord reached its maximum stretch, and at that moment, that gently flying golf ball changed direction and became a ballistic weapon headed right at us. And of course, since it had a bolt in it, it came complete with its own shrapnel. All I really remember after that was my dad screaming, “Get down! Get down!” and three grubby little children hitting the grass as fast as possible. After the Golf Ball of Death had passed over us, we all raised our heads…only to see it flying right back at us. After several passes back and forth overhead, the ball finally lost its momentum and dropped to the ground, at which point, we all jumped up and yelled, “Do it again, Dad!”
Now, I suppose it’s worth mentioning that my father may not have realized that hitting a golf ball attached to an elastic cord would have that kind of effect, but then again, I suppose it’s also worth mentioning that the man was a physics teacher, for Christ’s sake. Anyway, my mom made him disassemble the front-yard driving range apparatus, but I’m pretty sure he’s still got all the parts somewhere.
More recently, there was the attempt to solve the problem of the dog and the car. More specifically, my parents’ Corgi, Nigel, was getting old and couldn’t jump up into their SUV anymore, and neither one of my parents could lift him. So, my father decided to build a ramp for Nigel. That way, he figured, Nigel could go up the ramp, they could just put the ramp in the back of the car, and they could get it back out when they got to wherever they were going. It all sounded perfectly reasonable.
Now, my dad is at that age when a strange thing happens to old men: no matter how much money they might have, they refuse to pay for anything they think they could otherwise get for free. I mean, I know old guys who wouldn’t pay a penny for a dime because they couldn’t stand to part with the penny. They’d rather just walk around in the street until they find a dime on the ground.
So, a couple of years ago, my dad started keeping an eye on what the neighbors were throwing out on Trash Day. Of course, given that there are several other old men in the neighborhood, he isn’t the only one scouting out the scene, and I think Trash Day is kind of like a cross between the Olympics and a World War II re-enactment. But my dad has truly earned the title of Dumpster Diving Diva because he is devious, perfectly willing to lie to his neighbors, and completely capable of tripping his friends if it means getting to the good trash first, and I have to admit that the other guys in the neighborhood have a certain grudging respect for him on that account.
And I can just see some of the younger couples on the block watching the Trash Day drama unfold one morning. “Honey, that old man is in our trash again.” “Well, just don’t feed him…and don’t even go out there. This one’s got a BB gun.” I imagine those young people standing at the window yelling “Shoo! Shoo!” at my father, which of course only serves to alert the other old guys that there is a good stash of refuse at their house, and from there, it is only a matter of time until the whole thing blossoms into a swarming situation.
Anyway, my father finally dragged the pieces of an old bookcase out of someone’s trash one day, and he used the wood to construct Nigel’s ramp. Unfortunately, there were two things he hadn’t factored in. First, Nigel had an absolute phobia of ramps. He wouldn’t go near the thing, let alone walk up it. Of course, he may have known more about where the wood came from than he was letting on, but at any rate, the dog simply refused to participate no matter how much my parents coaxed, cajoled, and finally just threatened him. So, there was that.
The second thing is that in building the ramp, my father had become so heady with glee over having gotten the wood for free that he hadn’t thought much about weight issues, and in the final tally, the ramp weighed more than the dog did. So, my father built the ramp because my parents couldn’t lift the dog into the car, but even if Nigel had been willing to use his ramp, they couldn’t get it in the car anyway, so Nigel could never get out.
My father’s next plan was to dig a giant trench in the driveway. The way he figured it, if he couldn’t raise the dog, then he would lower the car. As luck would have it, though, Nigel (who was around 14 years old at the time) passed away before my dad was able to find a backhoe in someone’s trash, so my parents’ driveway remains intact to this day.
The strangest thing is that the time between the front-yard driving range apparatus adventure and the great dog ramp experiment spans nearly 40 years, and in between, my dad has come up with any number of other, whacked-out, crazy ideas (the plan to daisy-chain ten PC Jr computers together to make one normal machine is one of my all-time favorites). But I can honestly say that my parents, both of whom are in their early 80s now, haven’t changed one little bit from who they were when I was a kid. They aged, but they just never got old. For my mom, it’s all about simply flat-out refusing to get old, and for my dad, it’s the excitement of dreaming up his next hare-brained, ill-conceived project. And I really hope that somehow both of those things are genetic traits that I inherited.
So, the next time you start to feel the creepy hand of time sneaking up on you, take a page from my mom’s playbook—just say “no,” and go back to playing your favorite video game on your iTouch. Then take a cue from my dad—think up the craziest way possible to solve a simple problem, make the project as complicated as you can, push it right to the boundary of just plain stupid, and then have it. And while you’re working on that, consider a question first posed by the great Satchel Paige: “How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you are?”
Philosophy for a hungry planet.
Enjoy.
© R. Rissler, 2011. All rights reserved.
That was great Robin! Oh, and Happy Birthday!
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