Old Man

Value this time in your life kids, because this is the time in your life when you still have your choices, and it goes by so quickly.

When you're a teenager you think you can do anything, and you do.

Your twenties are a blur.

Your thirties, you raise your family, you make a little money and you think to yourself, "What happened to my twenties?"

Your forties, you grow a little pot belly, you grow another chin. The music starts to get too loud and one of your old girlfriends from high school becomes a grandmother.

Your fifties you have a minor surgery. You'll call it a procedure, but it's a surgery.

Your sixties, you have a major surgery, the music is still too loud, but it doesn't matter because you can't hear it anyway.

Seventies, you and the wife retire to Fort Lauderdale, you start eating dinner at two, lunch around ten, breakfast the night before. And you spend most of your time wandering around malls looking for the ultimate soft yogurt and muttering "how come the kids don't call?"

By your eighties, you've had a major stroke, and you end up babbling to some Jamaican nurse, who your wife can't stand, but who you call mama. Any questions?

- Billy Crystal as Mitch Robbins in City Slickers

Nobody likes getting old, except me.

Over the years, I have enjoyed many of the things that are typically associated with getting older. You don't believe me? Let me throw a few facts your way:

• I like Werther's Original
• I own a pair of 'indoor shoes'
• On several occassions, including while on vacation, I have taken naps in the afternoon
• I don't like to be in the sun too long
• I have trouble falling asleep
• I eat at odd times of the day
• I have utterred the words: "You damn kids"
• I have trouble remembering things that just happened
• I always look for the 'best' parking spot
• I'm fascinated by history

Yesterday, I went to see "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel" with my mom. It's a movie about a group of British retirees who decide to 'outsource' their retirement to India. I thoroughly enjoyed it, not only because it was a good movie, but because I identified with the characters. I thought to myself: "there's a group of people that I would like to hang out with."

By all accounts, at 33 years old, I am an old man.

...like the time I caught the ferry over to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for my shoe, so, I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on 'em. “Give me five bees for a quarter,” you'd say. Now where were we? Oh yeah: the important thing was I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn't have white onions because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones...

- Grandpa Simpson