Driving Miss Daisy

Suddenly I am 70 years old. I know it is only a temporary thing, but my recovery is giving me insight into what it is like to be old. And I can confirm that getting old ain’t for sissies. Among the many things this whole experience has done for me, it is making me a bit more aware of what my parents and other older people go through on a daily basis. I hope it will translate into a little more understanding and compassion. In the meantime, I’ll hide a self-indulgent wine behind that search for compassion and understanding.

Shuffle, Shuffle

First, there is the lack of mobility. I move slowly here at home and it still takes a bit of an effort to get up, sit down, bend down, reach high, etc. I feel like I should be wearing a ratty old bathrobe, shuffling about in worn fuzzy slippers, and yelling through my screen door at the neighborhood kids. No matter where I am, though, I move a little slower than the rest of the world. I took my kids to EarthFare (a local healthy grocery store) to meet some friends for dinner—kids eat free on Thursdays. It was a complete zoo with kids and cranky, pushy parents madly rushing hither and yon in a relatively small space. We were all trying to get our kids to pick their meals, buy our own, retrieve our kids’ meals, and go sit down. I felt like a turtle trying to cross the Autobahn. And I could feel the annoyance of some of my fellow parents as I tried to negotiate the chaos. It is no fun to feel like you are in the way.

Does this bus go to Publix?

I can’t drive right now and won’t be able to for another couple of weeks. That has raised the burden on my wife as she has had to do all the driving around of kids to school, home school stuff, music lessons, play dates, etc. It is frustrating and a little demoralizing that I can’t help. Not being able to drive completely cuts off any independence, too. I can’t go to the grocery store because I want to roast a chicken tonight. I can’t drive my kids to the library to get some new reading books and check out a movie. I can’t go to Target to get some new socks or a hoodie for my son—he desperately wants one because I have been wearing one recently. I can’t ask my wife to drive me somewhere every time I get a wild hair—she’s got two other kids she’s already got to do that for, plus a business. I can see how it can become easy to see yourself as a burden, especially when the rest of the fast-paced, mad world is already picking up your slack. Maybe Miss Daisy can take public transportation to get a cup of coffee or buy a chicken.

Can I get a box?

Following the classic stereotype of the elderly, I eat like a bird. You always see older folk who go out to eat taking half their meals home in a box. That is me. I went to a Mediterranean place last night (Thank you to my wife for driving Miss Daisy to dinner) and got some falafel, a gyro and Greek salad. Half the falafel and gyro came home in a box. The funny thing is that I am starting to think like a septuagenarian too, because I thought to myself as I was packing my box, “Oh, good now I have lunch for tomorrow.”

Up before dawn

You hear your older friends and family say it all the time. They wake up at 4am and don’t go back to sleep. Here I am a 6am on Sunday, having been up for 2 hours already. I think what happens is that the need for rest in the middle of the day goes up but the need for total rest in any one day isn’t that much greater. The end result is that I may sleep some in the afternoon, but that means I don’t sleep as much at night. I am tired and ready for bed by 10 or 11 but wake up by 5 or 6. This sort of puts you out of sync with the rest of the productive world, and creates the perception that you are always tired or always sleeping.

As I’ve said, this is only temporary for me. I’ll get out of this mode as my body heals. It won’t hurt to get up or sit down, I’ll be able to move faster, and my doctor will eventually give me back the keys to my car…oh yeah and let me ride my bike. For people who don’t have that kind of recovery to look forward to, it must be a personal struggle to keep life on the positive side. I can see where the understanding of others would go a long way to making it easier for them to get up every day, push on the old slippers, and shuffle off to the kitchen at 5am for another day in paradise.