On Being 69.

Or how it’s fun to age. Most of the time.

This article was inspired by fellow Medium writer Leonardo Del Toro. His article is a great piece of advice.

So, how’s it feel to be 69? Up to now, it’s not that bad.

My mind seems to work OK, except for the sequels of a nasty case of PTSD which robs me of being able to concentrate more than a couple of hours at a time. Annoying, frustrating, but liveable. Oh, and the PTSD sometimes screws up my sleep, which makes me more tired the next day. I hate recurring nightmares.

My body’s doing not too badly, although I seem to be limited to only 20 pushups at a time. I mean real pushups. Body stiff as a board (no undulating, humping, snake-like bending of the spine), upper arms horizontal on the down part, and elbows extended on the up part. Still, it wasn’t so long ago that I could do 50 a few times a day. I’ll try to improve on that in the coming weeks (once I get rid of this damned COVID I caught 2 weeks ago, even though triple vaxxed).

My spine’s OK in spite of a nastily herniated disk which has numbed up a part of my left leg. But no back pain anymore (I can’t have any back pain, my vertebrae have all fused up LOL). Oh, and eventually, I’ll have to have joint replacement surgery, but it doesn’t show yet. Not bad for having passed my last Army battlefield fitness test at age 58.

Of course, my prostate acts up a bit, but taking 5mgs of Cialis every few days keeps it in step. Sex just ain’t what it used to, but hey I can still get an erection, etc so, no complaint. Plus, my wife of more than 45 years is still as pretty as she ever was. It’s all in the smile. And the chirpiness. What a girl!

But what I want to tell younger folks is that life right now is fun.

It’s fun because all my life, my main goal has been to learn stuff. Anything there is to learn. Pick a subject, and I’m interested.

Many years back, the first time I was out at sea in one of Her Majesty’s Canadian destroyers, the Captain sent for me, but the crew couldn’t find me. “Where’s my doctor?” asked the Captain (they really are the on board supreme authority). That’s when my medic answered “Oh, he’s probably down in the engine room with the chief mechanic.” Well, how else am I going to learn how that stuff works?

These days, my wife and I are perfecting our astronomical knowledge. Tomorrow (she’s working today — yeah, early on in the pandemic, she figured that if we’re going to be confined to barracks and deprived of travelling because of that damned COVID, she may as well go back to work). So, tomorrow, we’ll be looking at the different kinds of stars and their nuclear reactions. The last two days, we’ve been looking at the History of our Solar System, especially the part where Jupiter barrelled in closer to our orbit. We did have to review a few physics notions for that one. Astrophysics is not for the faint of heart.

For all that, we can access YouTube or my library (yes, it’s my library — I paid out for the books myself out of my own allowance. No wonder her bank account is about five times the size of mine).

Next fall, we’ll be (hopefully) going to Sicily to visit accompanied by our sister-in-law who is Sicilian. I’ll seize on the opportunity to visit the Canadian battlefields with my brothers. Yup, Canadians were there too. The Americans went West under Patton, the Brits went up the East Coast, and the Canadians, straight up the middle. What a bloody fight that was.

How can we afford all that? Take heed, young ones. This is the first part of my unsolicited biography.

First, I had damned good parents. Luck. They made sure I studied as hard as I could when I was little and gave me everything I needed to do so. Library card and strongly encouraged to read anything I fancied, being exposed to as many languages possible, being exposed to as many cultures as possible (in Quebec in the 50s, that wasn’t very many). Plus, I was sent to a French private school run by nuns from France. Quebec culture and French culture are very different, and I was lucky to imbibe both. Plus, the Catholic culture. After school, in the neighbourhood, all my friends were anglophone, so I learned their culture. And of course, my very own culture.

School was a bit boring, but I did learn all those complicated French grammar rules. For that, I’m grateful.

The nuns didn’t have any seventh grade, so after I finished grade six, I was sent right to high school where I arrived two years younger than all my classmates (I had started first grade at age five so that accounts for the other year). Of course, being two years younger than all those testosterone-fuelled kids was a bit of a challenge. How did I survive? Don’t really know, except that my own children say that I have street smarts, whatever that is. So, I managed to avoid most of the bullying somehow.

The girls part was tough though. Very tough. Going to an all-boys school and having limited contact with girls our age, we had to deploy all kinds of schemes to get in touch with girls from other schools. What was even more difficult for me is that, in my family, we reach puberty at a later age. Plus, most adolescent girls seem to prefer boys which are a little older than them. Now, imagine this thirteen-year-old not even close to being mature, going with his fifteen-year-old classmates to visit girls at the school next door. Nope, not very successful at first.

Fortunately, eventually, I did hit puberty and, as seems the norm in my family, I grew a foot in a year!

As an adolescent in an all-boys class, especially when you’re younger than the other guys, you do not want to stick out as being a nerd or a teachers’ pet. Therefore, my marks went down into a region that ensured I was good enough, but not enough to stick out. Maybe there is something about that street-smart thing. Fortunately, by the time I grew that foot in those twelve months, the bad side effects of all that testosterone seemed to also give me a bit of maturity. In some aspects.

Plus having a best friend whose father was an MD and had the gift of gab to keep a bunch of us lovesick adolescents interested in what he was telling us. In a mix of interesting stories about his travails as a surgeon in a downtown hospital, and encouragements to make sure we had good marks, and to study hard, especially the difficult stuff, ie sciences (math, physics, chemistry, biology), this man oriented my life — plus that of his three sons who are all highly respected physicians.

Ah, yes, the girl thingy. Well, one of our math teachers was involved in a theatrical company and we happened to see one of their presentations. All amateurs, but to us, they seemed absolutely superb. So, when that teacher said he was going to create a group to present a play the following year, I was in. BTW, that’s the year I happened to grow a foot. When they had assigned the roles, I was a five-footer with a squeaky voice, so it was natural that I be assigned the role of the old miser. But as the months passed by, I had to adapt this new body to the character, so that by the time the play was ready to be performed, I had to scrunch up my back and walk all crookedly with the help of a cane and change my voice so that it sounded all old and crochety. In the theater, you don’t have a mike, so you have to learn to project your voice all the way to the rearmost seat. Kids’ll learn anything.

So, that fall, after hours and hours of practice, we started on a tour of all the schools in Quebec City. In the school right next to ours, the nuns who ran the place had a small lunch for us after the presentation. Suddenly, without having anything to do with it, I was romantically involved with a beautiful, petite brunette. My very first love. Funny that, she was a year older than me, and her previous boyfriend four. Thankfully, she was a patient teacher in the art of making-out. I shall forever remain in her debt.

That was the year I upped my marks, especially in science, as there was no longer any bullying risk by being a nerd. Plus, having the most beautiful girl of the gang as my very own girlfriend ensured that “le p’tit Dauphin” became “le grand Dauphin” that year. Which also happened to be my senior year in high school. Starting college at the age of sixteen sure gave me a step up in life.

So far, with a bit of luck, and a bit of pluck, things had started out great.

As we say in the service, MTF, More to follow.

So, up to now: 1) Be lucky. 2) Be curious. 3) Read everything you can lay your hands on. 4) Study science, the hard stuff.

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