A fact nobody admits
afew days ago i celebrated my 72nd birthday and the occasion did not mean anything to me, so what about others? old age is inevitable. it is like being at a height of 36,000 feet fl ying in a metal body so you cannot do anything other than to continue to live your life, within your surroundings, reach your destination, and return from where you started, or fall off. there are no guarantees, but just the actions that we may take to help improve the chances of prolonging our lives, but we are predestined to leave that life. this is a fact that everyone knows, but almost nobody would like to admit. that denial is the cause of many of our problems and this is another story. an elderly optimist says that when he takes time to answer a question, it is not because he has become slow in thinking, but because his memory ‘chip’ is fi lled with so much information that it takes time to search for what he is looking for unlike a small boy who knows nothing about life, new restaurants and sedatives. the millions of other information details searching in the memory of the elderly is like searching for a person’s name in the new york city phone directory, compared to searching for the same person’s name in a small city guide, for example. another old man, defending himself and people of his category, says that when he goes to another room to look for something, he forgets what he came for, returns back empty handed. this has nothing to do with the memory weakness but a person of his age needs to do a lot of exercise, such as walking. yet another one says the air travel, especially during the peak season has become a burden for everyone, even for passengers of distinctive class, especially on airlines which do not do well. they pack passengers on buses like sardines and the lucky one only fi nds a seat. it is fortunate that a lot of people offer seats to the elderly and this makes them lucky. a friend told me he has been suffering from prostate cancer and has been suffering a lot from a very young age every time he wanted to empty his bladder but now he does not hesitate to resort to any place to urinate because it can be overlooked due to his old age. another friend told me that when he was a young man, he saw the tears in his (skeptic) wife’s eyes, every time he came home late from his diwaniya. now he has become old and still he returns from the diwaniya at the same time, but fi nds his wife sound asleep, reassured of his ‘inability’. i have many ideas to write about, but remembering all of them takes time, and the newspaper is waiting for the article, and the editor cannot wait.
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