Getting old

It drives me crazy to see 22 year-olds go on about how they are getting old. To my mind, if you don't sigh a lot, you don't grunt when you sit down, and you don't grunt when you get up
... You are not old.

I am wrong to cast the stone. I moan about getting old. I am trying to quit. If I am bitching about being old now and I live long enough to need walker and a hearing aid, I will have wasted a lot of my life force bitching about the inevitable.

I am at the point where
- I have visible grey hair
- the smile lines don't go away when I'm done with the happy face
- a stiff night of drinking causes immense pain for much of the next day
- the kid who bags my groceries calls me "Ma'am."
- recovering from an all-nighter takes two days of good sleep
- excessively greasy foods makes me queasy
- I am at least as passionate about buying bed linens as the latest "It" band's CD ... if not more
- I refrain from chatting up 20 year old boys with wallet chains
- I go places and the music is too loud

Time passes and we change. We grow. We age. We die. This is how it is.

There is a day to day generational contrast to my existence. I live in a college town. I walk down the street and am surrounded by beautiful youth, people who are at a minimum ten years younger than me. Sometimes I wonder what I have done with that time, what I have gained, and if I have learned anything worthwhile.

Still, I would not go back. I have clear memories of the mess I was. Times has freed me from things that used to plague me, freed me to become a different kind of mess.