Borders

Borders are real. They divide one side from another and define one side from another. Of an instant everything is different - the clothes, the posture, the traffic, the architecture, the air we breathe - it's all so suddenly different and so suddenly irrevocable. It is what it is, and it will stay that way. Your job is not to change it but to negotiate it (to find its landmarks) and by your negotiation perhaps foster a difference.

One thinks of them from country to country, of  course, but it's also state to state, city to city, maybe even town to town and neighborhood to neighborhood. Note James Baldwin's Another Country. You are in one place yet, with a single forward step, you are someplace else, another world, another's world. The street may still be firm beneath your feet and the people bustling, but the air is different and you are breathing it and you may well be some place from which you will not return. It is so different there. And now you are aware of everything you took for granted before your one step: automobiles, street signs, street vendors, store fronts, aromas, pace, expressions...And if there is no going back? Get used to it. You don't rule this world. Strange people fill the air with the cut and color of their clothes, the jabber of their tongues, their fast food pallets, trucks with tacos and tamales and terrapin sauce. Oy.

I have recently crossed a border of no return, the one border that is not porous.  In but not out. I have entered the Land of the Elderly, and it is different here. Just yesterday an older woman at the supermarket (younger than me by twenty years) insisted she carry my grocery bag. People hold doors. I have become, "sir". They move more quickly, speak like the breeze in trees. Their machinery is smarter than I am. Their speed limit is not mine. Drive at your own pace and accept the abuse. Get used to it. You're not going back. I am in the Land of the Elderly. While I may not like being here, the alternative is not acceptable. So, I use a cane, watch where I'm walking, do isometrics at my desk, try not to dribble my food...It's a new world, and I want to be a good citizen.

A good citizen, yes, but there is a certain lawlessness inherent here, right? Really, demanded of us. Thank God. Mostly, we really don't know the rules, so we are always breaking one or another. Or we are adapting, and, like water on rock, bringing change. Or we really do stop sweating the small stuff. We really, truly no longer give a shit. So it ought to be an exciting time as well. We clash with our newly discovered limitations, but we skirt them and do an end around. 

I have a t-shirt with a lean, mean 'n' crusty old fart of a guy leaning against a Harley Hog with the caption, "Don't piss off old people. The older we get the less life in prison is a deterrent."  I'd like to think I am capable of at least a scintilla more mischief before I die. Stay tuned.

The problem is the pain, and, in some cases, the gear one needs to cart around from walkers to oxygen canisters to "paid companions" with diaper bags attached to their wrists like the nuclear codes. However, if we're blessed to be free of that paraphernalia, pain is what's left. How to deal with it?  Yeah. How to deal with it.  Your thoughts?