Joint effort

Ah, the joys of the Golden Years!

When I first wake up I’ll sometimes just lie completely still, not moving a muscle. I like to listen to what my body’s trying to tell me at the only time of the day when absolutely nothing hurts because I’m as motionless as a statue, and statues feel no pain.

“Stay like this, all will be well,” my body says gently, before growling “you move one inch, I will put you in a world of hurt that’ll make you scream for your momma.”

So I move, and my body proves its point. I move my left leg and my peroneal tendonitis kicks in and feels like a burning rubber band up the left side of my calf. I move my left arm toward that pain and my super arthritic shoulder refuses to be neglected and sends searing sheets of pain down the outside of my arm. My right shoulder, apparently jealous of the attention I’m trying to give my left, sends its own agonizing message down the shoulder to the arm causing me to slam both shoulders back to the bed to stop the madness. And my right knee, soggy with two cortisone shots in less than a year, decides to get in on the act and locks up for old time’s sake while my left knee, riddled with more minor arthritis, takes careful notes for the day it decides to go pro on its own.

Shoot me. Shoot me now.

With age comes wisdom, it is said. But with wisdom comes the knowledge that the genie of our youth, fast and agile and unencumbered by nagging injuries of an athletic life, ain’t going back in that bottle. For one thing, the bottle’s somehow gotten smaller over the years as we’ve somehow gotten bigger so we couldn’t squeeze that genie back in if we dipped it in vegetable oil and pounded it with a sledgehammer.

When we were kids, we’d run everywhere, flying over loose, uneven stonewalls, leaping over fences on the run, or jumping to the ground from high places, limber and rubbery and unafraid, hesitating not one second. I remember pushing as high as possible into the sky on a swing and leaping off at the apex of flight, landing in a laughing crumple on the ground far below. Which could explain those balky knees today.

Now if I want to jump down from something even remotely high, I hesitate and weigh the risk of landing and then sit down to slide to the ground easily and safely. The young man still trapped in the old-man body who could jump out of a second-story barn door wonders what the hell happened to him. It doesn’t seem that long ago that I used to keep up (somewhat) with my grandson, who turns nine in January. Now, I just say, “You go ahead Mikey, Grandpa will be over there on that bench wondering what the hell happened to him.”

Life happened, of course. As it does to us all if we’re very lucky (as I am) to have had a good run that hopefully lasts a good deal longer. The impact of those years is gradual, unnoticeable for many years, until that pain that used to come and go now stays with a stubborn resolve. And that’s just the physical stuff. Inside is the longing for younger, pain-free days and the ability to move at will and leap figurative tall buildings in a single bound.

But, as Steely Dan sang, “Those days are gone forever, over a long time ago, oh yeah.”

Life, the wise expression goes, is indeed wasted on the young, but we were young once, not realizing how stupid we were and how the tradeoff for wisdom would very well include a body that just won’t do what it used to.

So I’ll mine the gold of wisdom for as long as my mind allows and endure the slings and arrows of outrageous aging with a minimum of complaining. And I’ll lie as still as possible for a few blessed pain-free moments in the morning until my body reminds me otherwise.

If I knew then what I know now, I’d never grow up. Then again, I really haven’t, and it has made all the difference.

Paul Kandarian is a lifelong area resi dent and, since 1982, has been a profession writer, columnist, and contributor in national magazines, websites, and other publications.