My Ortho Family

For the past decade or so I’ve been going regularly to an orthopedic clinic to have various broken parts of my body pieced back together again, or at least jury rigged with bailing wire and duct tape. I’ve shown up alternatively for treatment and surgery for Dupuytren’s Contracture in both hands and Osteoarthritis in my left knee and hands. It took maybe a dozen visits before the receptionists recognized me and, foregoing my name, only had to ask “Which doctor are you seeing today?” The clinic is large, usually with 15-20 patients waiting in the lobby. A nurse will come out every couple of minutes and call out a name and take the patient back to an examining room. Not me. The nurse just comes to the lobby, finds me without calling my name, says “Ready?”, and back we go. My file is the size of a phone book. I’ve suggested they go digital to save them space and having to wheel it down the hall on a dolly whenever I visit. (It’s under consideration.)

After the first few years of this I felt bad about being reminded repeatedly how decrepit my body is and how old I’m getting. It’s somewhat depressing to have a tab at an orthopedic clinic (they no longer ask for my co-pay when I check out). But recently I’ve been feeling more positive about my relationship with the doctors, nurses, technicians, and staff at the clinic. Our familiarity is comforting, like visiting old friends. No, more like family. My ortho family. We should make a TV commercial, one of those where I enter, happy and smiling, limping on my cane, and they gather around me, cheerful and welcoming. Maybe there are balloons. And flowers. And the Turtles’ “Happy Together” is playing. What knee replacement? What degenerative bone disease? "So happy together."

Bad Feet

For the past week or so I’ve had bad feet. My right ankle may be sprained. My left foot has what I suspect is a neuroma, a tumor on a nerve between the metatarsals. I sometimes limp on my left foot, and sometimes on my right. When both are in pain, I limp on both, which doesn’t look to be limping at all, just a slow waddle, an old man with two bad feet. Coming down the stairs in the morning, I’m Walter Brennan in The Real McCoys (and if you don’t get that allusion to age infirmity then you’re just not old enough, and should be glad).

This is one of the things that’s fucked about getting old. There are so many different aches and pains that you don’t know what to think about any of them. Do you have an injury? A disease? Should you see a doctor? Or are you just a decrepit old fart who should shut up and shuffle along, or just lie down, quit whining, and die already? For now, I choose to whine, complain about the pain, and rage against the age. What do we have if we don’t have that?

Hot Fun In the Summertime

When I was young we didn’t have sun screen or sun block. We had sun tan lotion, but that was meant only to minimize burns and help develop tans. It almost never worked to do either. The SPF was probably somewhere in the low single digits. We also didn’t have computers or computer games or video games or social media. For that matter we didn’t even have TV. There were only three TV stations and all they broadcasted during the days were soap operas. So I spent a great deal of my youth, especially through the summers, outdoors: playing baseball, playing golf, swimming, fishing in farm ponds with no shade. And I burned easily and often, my skin pale, my eyes blue. And I’m paying for it now.

For the past 20+ years I’ve been seeing a dermatologist regularly for actinic keratosis, small precancerous skin lesions that need to be burned off with liquid nitrogen before they grow into full-blown cancer. About 10 years ago, my doctor discovered a basal cell carcinoma, the most common non-melanoma cancer, on my upper arm and had to cut it out, cauterize it, and stitch it up. Today, he had to do the same for a squamous cell carcinoma, the second most common skin cancer, that had grown from an undetected actinic keratosis on my cheek. It’s minor surgery, done in-office, and the only pain is the needle injecting the local anesthesia (though the sizzle and smell of my burning flesh during the cauterizing of the wound is a tad disconcerting).

I’m one of those old farts who drive around during the summer feeling nostalgic and sad to see parks and playgrounds devoid of kids out playing baseball, soccer, basketball, kickball – anything. I’m pleased when I see pictures of my young grandkids out in the park on swings and slides or at the zoo or at the pool. But I also know now – as I hope they do – that there are dangers in that wonderful, warming sun, dangers that take years and decades to appear, and then more years and decades to play out.

The Beard's Comeback

I almost didn’t graduate from high school. Actually, I almost wasn’t allowed to go through my high school graduation. As was custom, seniors got out of school a week early, before graduation, at Wichita High School Southeast, and in anticipation, I stopped shaving a week before that. This was in 1967, the year the Beatles began showing up on their album covers with facial hair. Of course, not shaving for several days or even a week when I was 18 wouldn’t have produced any observable results. But not shaving for two weeks did yield a faint shadow of facial hair along my jaw. As I stood in line on the concourse of the field house for graduation, some faculty or administrator spotted my growth, sounded the alarm (facial growth was strictly forbidden at our school, for males or females), and an incident ensured. First there was talk of finding a razor to shave me, but no one had thought to bring shaving equipment to a graduation. (I bet they did the next year.) The next possibility was to deny me entrance to the ceremony, call for my parents (who were up in the audience), and have them take me home. I can’t recall the specifics, but after much deliberation over a situation that had never happened before, cooler heads must have prevailed, and I was finally allowed to resume my place in the procession of happy (for all kinds of reasons) graduates.

I recall this because apparently the beard is having something of a comeback. Chuck Norris has had a beard for some time. Zach Galifianakis sports a beard in some of his movies. Even the hunks George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matthew McConaughey, and Leonardo DiCaprio have been seen with facial hair (tasteful, to be sure) of late. Prince William occasionally has a beard. And just last night I saw that Steve Carell now also has one. 

(This is not me.)

I’ve had a beard most of my adult life. I’ve had a mustache all of the 45 years since those two weeks before my high school graduation. For 40 years, I’ve only been beardless twice, briefly: In 1975, as a graduate student in theater, I played a soldier in a Jules Feifer play who ran out and was shot in the first 10 seconds of the play and remained lying dead on the stage for the first three-minute scene, so for the sake of verisimilitude, shaved my beard (though not my mustache) before the show opened. I was already growing it back during the run of the show. In 1981, I went for a year to teach for the military in Germany, and thought it probably best to shave my beard (though not my mustache) to better fit in with my students on post. But after only a couple of weeks of fitting in with my students, I realized that I’d rather fit in with the Germans around town and so grew out first a goatee and then later a full beard. And I’ve had that beard for all of the past 31 years.

Styles come and go, and beards are no different. Whenever they’ve come back into fashion I feel something of the cutting edge. But then inevitably they fade from fashion again a few years later and I hang on as a hairy relic. My beard (and hair) now are gray and that in itself confers a certain status, either the learned professor, or the wise sage of years – or just an old coot. It doesn’t matter anymore. Comebacks are not something we of a certain age give much attention to. We're happy to be able to grow anything. It's a daily reminder that we're still alive.

Fortunate Travel

I don’t know how we’ve been so fortunate to do so much traveling over the past 20 years or so. It can’t be karma. I doubt it’s genes. Part of it’s money, yes (we somehow make more than we should, but so far we haven’t been caught). But much of our travel has been wrapped around our jobs, one or the other of us attending conferences or trade shows or whatever on the company dole and the other tagging along for just the cost of airfare and food. And a few times we’ve travelled just on our own because we wanted to and could get a good deal. About 12 or 15 years ago we decided that we should travel while we could, while we had the money and health and still-living brain cells. But as I look back over our travel of the past two decades, I’m both surprised and thankful:

Domestic

We have of course travelled often in states adjoining Iowa: Minnesota (Minneapolis, Duluth, Grand Marais, several times), Illinois (Chicago, once or twice a year), Missouri (St. Louis, Kansas City), and Kansas (Wichita).

Beyond the upper Midwest: Indiana (Indianapolis), Ohio (Columbus, Dayton, Oxford), Tennessee (Memphis, Nashville), New York (Rochester, New York City), Massachusetts (Boston/Cambridge), Washington D.C. (numerous times to visit our granddaughters), North Carolina (Raleigh/Durham), Georgia (Atlanta), Florida (Clearwater Beach), Louisiana (New Orleans), Texas (Austin), New Mexico (Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Taos), Arizona (Phoenix), Colorado  (Boulder), Utah (Salt Lake City, Park City), California (San Francisco, Berkeley, Oakland), Oregon (Portland), Washington (Olympia Peninsula), Alaska (Anchorage, Seward, Homer).

Foreign

And then there’s the fortunate foreign travel: Canada (Victoria, Vancouver (not far foreign)), Belize (San Ignacio, Caye Caulker), England (London), Ireland (Dublin), France (Paris, Burgundy, Alsace-Lorraine), Germany (Berlin), Czech Republic (Prague), Italy (Rome, Florence, Amalfi Coast), Spain (Barcelona), India (Mumbai, Goa).

It’s not the longest list – we have friends whose would be about twice as long – but we like it, we’ve taken advantage of what we can. And we’re hopeful of more. It’s something of an old saw, but whenever we come back from a trip – here in the US or overseas – we never fail to comment on how much more of the country (the Northeast, the South, Hawaii) or the world (Mexico, South America, Africa, the Far East, Australia) we have yet to see. If one spent one’s whole life doing nothing but traveling I don’t know if you could cover the earth, or even all of the earth that you would want to visit. I don’t think I could. A lifetime isn’t long enough to take in the whole of the world. But we hope that we’ve still got another decade or so where we can at least add to our list and take in what we can of it while we can.

Walking the Path From Ravello

We’d taken the bus in the morning up from Amalfi to Ravello, perched on a cliff 1000 feet above the Mediterranean, but decided to take the stairway-path back in the afternoon, not to be reminded of how old we are but rather to take advantage of the temporary good weather and enjoy the vistas promised on the climb down. But of course, despite the spectacular vistas, terraced gardens and orchards, stuccoed houses balanced on the rock cliffs, and centuries-old walls and staircases, we couldn’t help but be regularly reminded that we probably were too old to be doing this shit. Our Rick Steves’ Naples & the Amalfi Coast guidebook said that it would take 40 minutes from Ravello to Atrani (and then 15 minutes more to Amalfi). The young woman at the Tourist Information office in Ravello, where we got a map, pointed our way and said that it would take 30 minutes. It took us 90 minutes to get to Atrani. Of course, we did pause numerous times to take in and take pictures of the views, and we stopped a couple of times on well-placed benches. But mostly we were just slow. A couple of younger couples passed us on their way down, no doubt making the 30-40 minute time. And we met another young couple near Atrani just starting their way up. I joked, “You’re going the wrong way,” but they said they’d walked down that morning and were on their way back up to their hotel. Try that again in 40 years, I considered warning them. But while it took us longer than we’d thought, we weren’t in any hurry, there wasn’t any pain involved, there were no falls, and the views were impressive. And we rewarded ourselves with gelato in Atrani’s quiet, cool piazza. With age comes time to dawdle.

AARP Wants Me To Die

AARP wants me to die. First, they want me to renew my membership with a “special offer” of five years for only $49 – “Less than 82 cents each month!” Then they want me to die. Or to be more charitable, they’re betting that I’m going to die before the five years are up. At least that’s the way I read the offer: If I buy in for five years, it’s only a deal if I live for the full five years. If I die after, say, three years (and certainly if I die after one or two years), they get an extra two (or three or four) years of membership dues (yes, discounted, but still) that I wouldn’t have otherwise bought. I don’t know if it’s sucker bet or not. I’m not expecting to die in the next five years. But who is?

I joined AARP when I turned 50, 13 years ago, only for the discounts on hotels, museums, restaurants, and so forth. I didn’t particularly like the idea of joining a club for codgers. But I did like the discounts. And I suppose that’s the reason I’ll probably take this new bet and double-down on the next five years.

Movies Today

As I watch all the previews for movies on TV these days, I’m beginning to think I may not be able to see another movie ever again. Or at least not another movie in the theater. A couple of years ago I vowed not to see any movie that featured explosions in its advertising. That increasingly became a lot of movies. Recently I’ve added CGI monsters or violent car crashes or fantasy weirdness in general. I just want to watch movies about real people in real places dealing with real situations, something I might be able to relate to. I have no use for cartoons writ large on the movie screen. But that is apparently what we’re being given and I understand I’m not in the demographic for what passes for entertainment these days. The only comfort I take away is that I’m saving some amount of money in my retirement by not plopping down $10 for that crap. -- Hey! You kids get off my lawn!

Willy Loman and Me

I may have to drop Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman from my Drama class. I’ve included it every semester for the past 15 years, and it generally works well in helping students learn about character, motivation, empathy, and plot, not to mention tragedy. But three years ago, a problem emerged that I hadn’t anticipated: I turned 60. Which, as one of my students pointed out in discussion (not in connection to me), is the age of Willy “I’m tired to the death” Loman in the play. (Coincidentally, the original Broadway production opened on February 10, 1949, three days before I was born.) Making it worse, each semester, as Willy stays forever 60, I grow older year by year. And my students continue to describe Willy in their discussions and papers (with no conscious reminder to me) that he’s “an old man,” or “a very old man,” or “a very old, sad, demented man.” I have to check myself from correcting their misperceptions (“He’s only been horribly overworked, burnt out” or “60 is the new 50”). And I hesitate anymore to read my students’ evaluations of the class (“I liked the readings, but the teacher is a very old, sad, demented man”). I have, though, made sure to emphasize in our discussion of the play the one positive thing that Charley finds to say about Willy in the Requiem: “He was a happy man with a batch of cement.”

A Distant Friendship

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Actinic Keratosis

One of the several old man ailments I suffer is actinic keratosis, a small, scaly deformation of the skin, usually the face, arms, or hands that may develop into skin cancer over time. It is caused by having fair skin; long-term, daily sun exposure; multiple severe sunburns when young; and old age – all conditions I can lay claim to. For the past 20-plus years I’ve gone to my dermatologist, Dr. Tom, at least once a year, sometimes twice, to have him search my skin for lesions and burn off those he finds with liquid nitrogen. There’s no pain, a little discomfort, and Dr. Tom and I have a nice chat, he asking me about what I’m teaching (or now how I’m enjoying my retirement) and me asking him how his kids are doing (he has a son in med school who he hopes will take over his practice in a few years). He’s a scuba diver and an amateur underwater photographer, and we’ve talked about the barrier reef off Belize. It’s become a friendly professional relationship. About a dozen years ago Dr. Tom found something more troublesome on my upper right arm than an actinic keratosis – a basal cell carcinoma, the most common form of skin cancer. He was able to dig it out in his office – the thing I recall most vividly was the smell of my burning flesh as he cauterized the wound – and there wasn’t any spread of the cancer found in the biopsy. The only real problem with my actinic keratosis is cosmetic. For a week or so after treatment (burning off with liquid nitrogen), my face sports three or four red scars that resemble war wounds, and people who meet me stop cold and stare as if I have leprosy, asking what in the world has happened. I explain the horror easily enough. It’s just a history of being Irish and fair-skinned, playing baseball shirtless through the summer in the sun when I was young, and growing old.

Another Surgery

I thought I was offering something of a joke when I suggested to my surgeon that it might be best to just cut off the pinky finger of my right hand, but I was surprised when he responded a bit too casually with, “Well, that’s a possibility, but I think we should try surgery again before amputation.” I suffer from Dupuytren’s Contracture (or disease or syndrome or fracture), a painless affliction, a hardening of the fibrous tissue beneath the skin of the palm that causes the fingers corresponding to the affected tissue to slowly flex or curl eventually into a permanent grip. Four years ago I underwent surgery (called fasciectomy) on my right hand to reverse the curling of the pinky finger, which had made it difficult to put my hand in my pocket or glove and impossible to use in typing. The surgery went fairly well, but I was told going in that it was not unusual for the condition to return. And it has. It’s more of an inconvenience, or at most a frustration, one more incessant reminder of age. I’m going in for another surgery. I don’t hold out much hope that it will alleviate the condition for more than a couple of years. But then that’s a couple of years before the next best option is amputation. And I can’t imagine a more defining marker of aging than when they start lopping off appendages.

Surviving Winter

If it weren’t for the arctic temperatures, the driving snow, the treacherous ice, winter would be a fairly pleasant season. There was a time when I thought I actually liked winter. I lived for a year in Minnesota, owned a pair of cross-country skis, and actually used them two or three times a year. I have pictures of me bundled in a parka, ski gloves, and stocking cap, leaning on my ski poles, my exhaled breath frozen on my glasses and in icicles dangling from my beard, a smile on my face that looking back now I can only interpret as delusional. As I’ve grown older, about all I enjoy in winter is central heating, watching TV, and Johnny Walker Red, neat. In literature, winter has always symbolized death, and that seems just about right. I bring a couple of gold fish each year in from our pond to winter over in an indoor fish tank. As the two piscine lounge in their 10-gallon central-heated resort (no TV or Scotch, though), they have no awareness of their buddies who they swam with through the summer who are now entombed, frozen in a pond of ice. I watch them suspended in their tank and envy their watery ignorance of winter.

Game 6

I missed last night what might have been the best World Series game in a generation. Or at least I missed the last few innings, which made it perhaps the best World Series game in a generation. Up until that point, the 6^th game between the St. Louis Cardinals (my team, if only by proximity) and the Texas Rangers (not my team, if only because they were once owned by George W. Bush) was, unlike the previous five games, sloppy, and suspenseful only in the sense of wondering who would fuck up last and lose it. (St. Louis had three errors that should have been five, and Texas had two that should have been three.) But in the top of the 7^th, Texas took a 7-4 lead on back-to-back home runs, and it was nearing my old-man bedtime of 10:00 p.m., so I decided St. Louis didn’t have a chance and went to bed. But the Cardinal Allen Craig hit a homerun in the bottom of the 8^th, and then in the bottom of the 9th, with two outs and two strikes, third baseman David Freese (who had had a routine pop fly bounce of his glove, then his head in an early inning) hit a triple, scoring two runs to tie the game, taking it into extra innings. In the top of the 10^th, the Rangers went ahead again with a two-run homer form Josh Hamilton. If I would have still been up, I would have gone to bed then. But in the bottom of the 10^th, the Cardinals’ Lance Berkman, again with two strikes and two outs, drove a single to score two runs and tie the game again. The Rangers didn’t score in the top of the 11^th. But Freese came up again and, with a full count, hit a line-drive homerun into straight-away center to win the game. Pandemonium greeted him as he touched home plate, the crowd was hysterical, his teammates ripped his jersey off him.

But I was asleep through all of this. I recount it only from what I’ve read in the papers and seen on TV today. This is another price of being old. But I doubt I was the only one. The game didn’t end until 11:40 CDT (12:40 EDT). It will be interesting to see how this game goes down in World Series history. If the Cardinals lose game 7 tonight, then it will probably fade into an afterthought. But if they win, it will no doubt go down as one of the best games in World Series history. And being over 60, retired, and having no shame, I’ll claim in my limited future to have stayed up for every thrilling moment of it.