I recently listened to actor Stanley Tucci being interviewed about getting older, and he shared some words of wisdom. (No, he didn’t suggest that older people should spend more time grooming their ear and nose hair – even though we should.) He said that we shouldn’t let aging consume us because there is so much for us to see and do.
Or, in my case, there is so much more Tex-Mex to eat. Now that I’m roughly the same age as the Hamburger Helper family of dried carbohydrate food products, I’m trying my best to follow Mr. Tucci’s advice, but my quickly crumbling carcass isn’t making it easy to remain philosophical.
I feel like one of those Halloween pumpkins someone left out on their porch until Valentine’s Day. It still generally looks like a pumpkin on the outside, but Heaven forbid that someone removes the lid to see what’s really going on in there. Just the other day, I came in from mowing the yard (tragic, I know), and my wife exclaimed, “What happened to your arm?!” As far as I knew, nothing happened to my arm, other than I was forced to use it in the unthinkable act of mowing my own yard.
But when I glanced down, I noticed that my bleeding forearm looked like I had been hired to give each of our local feral cats a pill. Apparently, I have developed what a slightly more elderly friend of mine calls “old man skin.” This is when your skin, especially on your forearms and shins, takes on the resilience of gift bag tissue – and not even the kind with.