Apart from pain, constipation, insomnia, loneliness, boredom, and a handful of other minor irritants, there is very little I want to change in my current existence.
Change and aging don’t mix well. Take the weather for instance. Just as I started getting used to the hot summer, autumn dared to arrive suddenly. From one day to the next the temperature dropped twenty-five degrees. Yesterday the air-conditioning was doing its utmost to keep me comfortable and today we have the heat on, but I’m not comfortable. I want the summer to come back and stay, dammit! (Sometimes Grumpy comes to the surface)
If it didn’t involve a change, I would move to Bali or somewhere similar, with constant weather, good food, and pretty girls to serve me. I don’t know where that came from.
Old habits, especially bad ones, are hard to leave behind. However, how can being served by pretty women be bad for you? Other than spoiling you and turning you into a lazy old slob and a pervert, what else could go wrong?
So, no more change for me. Everything around me is old; my wife, the dog, the house, my bones, and I like it that way. I’m not sure my wife shares my sentiments. She would certainly trade me for a much younger model. She did with our fine little sporty car. Last month she got up one bright sunny morning and announced she was tired of struggling in and out of our little car. She wanted a USB, something bigger and safer. A UBS or what do you call it? Something that had seats at the same height as her butt.
There she is in her new SUV
That same day we went SUV shopping. It was my job to decide on the technical merits and all she did was assess the height of the seat. Apart from that she needed the seats and the steering wheel to be heated and the rear gate to be automatic. Not much later we drove home in a SUV to her liking, a Mitsubishi plug-in. According to her, it is a bitchi to her liking.
Enough change for the time being. At our age of eighty-plus, any deviation from the road MOST taken (not to be confused with Robert Frost’s The Road NOT Taken) may cause uneasiness and feelings of unsettling ambivalence. We’re settled and comfortable, and by now I am so familiar with my surroundings, that I can get around with my eyes closed. I remember the days when the grass was greener on the other side of the fence and understand the need for people to travel like mad all over the place, further upsetting our fragile environment.
When the grass was greener on the other side
For heaven’s sake, why travel out of your comfort zone to Portugal or Iceland, where the food and climate won’t agree with you? Just to spend a week or so, and be glad to come home again? Of course, you can then brag to your friends about your most recent trip. They will retaliate by boring you with prattle about their ‘much more interesting’ trip to Patagonia or the Outback.
No more travel for me!