Every morning I awake to snap, crackle, and pop.  No, I’m not talking about my breakfast cereal.  I’m talking about my body when it tries to get out of bed.  At first it was just a little creak every once in a while.  Now my body plays the whole percussion section of the orchestra all by itself.  It’s amazing I’m so creaky, yet like the little Energizer Bunny, I keep going.  Well, perhaps the Energizer Bunny is not the best example.  In my case, it’s more like the decrepit tortoise who keeps plodding along in the middle of the road before someone runs him over, rendering him street pizza.  I just haven’t been run over yet, although sometimes when I wake up, my body feels so worn out I wonder if I’ve really died and nobody bothered to tell me. So I faithfully check the obituaries every morning to see if I’m in there.  If not, I go to work.

But seriously, how did my body manage to get so old?  On the inside is a thirty year old screaming, “What the heck happened?”  I used to have excellent vision.  Now I need my glasses to read the HEADLINES in the newspaper.  To add insult to injury, I need my glasses to FIND my glasses.  Blast it, I KNOW it’s a conspiracy, because they are NEVER where I left them.  I’ve become my mother!  I remember rolling my eyes when she was forever hunting for her glasses.  I suppose that’s karma coming back to bite me.   But I refuse to wear my glasses around my neck on one of those old people chains. I still have some pride.

And where did all those wrinkles come from?  All of a sudden I look like a blasted Sharpei! No amount of Oil of Olay is going to fix that, no matter what they advertise on TV using twenty-two year old models.  Plus the sagging skin.  Even though I’m thin, I still have wobbling triceps on the back of my upper arms.  My son was kind enough to point them out to me the other day as he jiggled my flabby flesh. What’s up with that?  And my poor knees look like those of a baggy elephant.  Am I destined to never wear sleeveless tops or shorts for the rest of my life?  On the other hand, though, if  I wear long sleeves and pants I might be able to give the illusion I’m not an old sagging woman.  But then what do I do about my face?  Botox?  With my luck I’d be left with one droopy, paralyzed eyelid making me look like a stroke victim or perpetually inebriated.  Besides, who can afford hundreds of dollars to have poison injected into their face?  (Apparently a lot of people besides me.)

Plus, for some reason, I seem to no longer have a waist.  I have to hitch my pants and skirts up to my armpits to keep them from falling down.  When did my waist disappear?  Or did other parts of my anatomy which will remain nameless just sink down to cover up my waist?  Sigh.

I tried to go to the gym to tone up.  You remember how well THAT went!  If not, see my earlier blog.  (Hint, hint!)  Then there’s the decrepit tortoise in me who wants to take a nap in the middle of the day even if I only got out of bed at eleven a.m.  At nine p.m., I can forget doing anything productive.  Or, for that matter, anything unproductive.  I’m kaput, unable to move and unable to keep my eyes open.  Just the other night my husband and I had a rare date night.  We had a nice dinner out, came home at 8:30 and fell asleep by nine.  On a Friday night!  I can’t possibly be the same woman who stayed out into the wee hours of the night several hundred years ago.

I won’t even go into the loss of my mental faculties.  I can’t remember what I was going to say about them anyway.  But aside from free small sodas for seniors at Chik-Filet, getting old is the pits!  I’m really angry at my body for betraying me like this, especially when I have been so good to it over the years by rewarding it with chocolate!

 

 

Award winning author, Ellen Fannon, is a practicing veterinarian, former missionary, and church pianist/organist. She originated and wrote the Pet Peeves column for the Northwest Florida Daily News before taking a two-year assignment with the Southern Baptist International Mission Board. She and her husband have also been foster parents for more than 40 children, and the adoptive parents of two sons.  Her first novel, Other People’s Children, the humorous account of the life of a foster parent, was released last November and is available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and the trunk of her car. She lives in Valparaiso with her husband, son, and assorted pets.

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