Times A Wastin’

“That’s got to hurt your ball sack.” The woman said, who was dancing next to me on the dance floor. “It was very impressive”, added her friend, as I came back up from having just dropped into the splits. It didn’t seem any more impressive to me than when I used to do the same thing more than 40 years ago on the dance floor. As the sign used to say on the gym where I used to train, “You don’t stop exercising because you get old, you get old, because you stop exercising.

I remember that my parents, who were part of a generation that grew up on a diet of biblical truisms, would often reflect on the fact that no one could expect more than their three score years and ten. It was a truism my Mother disproved in practice, by living to 89. It didn’t stop her from the time she was about 40, continuing to believe that everything from there was inevitably downhill, and that you should behave accordingly. But, I have no intention of growing old gracefully.

My Mother seemed to gauge her success by reading assiduously the death column in the local paper, to see who she had outlived. My gauge is to watch the TV adverts for the latest fitness regime, and to compare my own abilities with those in the adverts. Jumping knees into the chest, squat thrusts, alternate arm press ups, yes I can still do that.

I rejoined my wife, and my old friend and his wife after I came off the dance floor. “You know when you wake up, only to find that actually you have’t woken up, but are still dreaming?” I asked. But, no, they didn’t know. I seemed to be the only one who had experienced that. “Well,” I continued, “I still often dream that I’m on the dance floor, doing jumping back drops, side and back presses, jack-knives and lots of stuff I did when I was seventeen. Then I think I’ve woken up, and yet I’m still able to do all that stuff, only to find I hadn’t woken up at all!”

I don’t know how long I’ll be able to keep doing what I do, but I intend to keep doing it as long as I can. As the saying goes, no one gets to the end of their life and says, “I wished I hadn’t had so much sex.” And for me, I wouldn’t want to look back and think I wish I hadn’t enjoyed myself dancing so much, either.