Signposts
Marking time past 60
As I grow older, I mark my aging process by comparing myself with my peers –- a slippery slope, indeed. I look around, checking out my contemporaries for evidence that I am ‘holding it together,’ and doing, if not better, at least as well as most of the other ‘Boomers’ who inhabit my world. Maybe, probably, this is my own form of denial, of ignoring the passage of time and the inevitable losses that follow in its wake.
Each year seems to bring a new challenge, a new imperfection to obsess over. Various body parts and their coverings, (my ears, my hair), which I took for granted well into my forties, are now a source of frustration. Now, as I fumble with my hearing aid –- I suddenly lost 2/3 of the hearing in my left ear fifteen years ago –- or do my version of a comb-over to combat my bald spot and ever-increasing forehead, I naturally notice men with good ears and great hair, thick and brown, black or gray, while envy brews in my gut like battery acid.
Years ago, when I was a teenager, I’d tease my father about his comb-over, his sizable bald spot, the battle he was clearly losing. I knew this –- male pattern baldness –- would never happen to me, not when I was the one of his three sons with “the good hair,” thick and wavy like my mother’s. Fast forward forty years and that hair is now thin, lifeless, and flecked with gray. (Actually, I…
