You Just Never Know

In 26 days I'll turn 49. That's a four PLUS a nine and I am losing my (aging) mind.
How in hell did I get to be 49? I still feel 14 in my head; I am quite immature. Someone farts around me and I laugh. I get much enjoyment watching a dog chase its tail. Cartoons still crack me up. I know every word of every song from Disney's Frozen. (I saw the movie twice, by myself.)
Then I wake up each morning, feeling cadaverous: stiff, I mean. The back, the neck, the shoulders, the knees, my right ankle. Left wrist.
And I am (only?) 48. What will 58 feel like? Seventy? Eighty? Will I be too stiff to stand erect? Will I be one of those humped-back women I see pushing the grocery cart?
***
Fortunately, my Uncle Neal called me, out of the blue, two nights ago. He was requesting a phone number that I didn't have, but given my reporting acumen, I was able to get what he needed within two minutes. (Sometimes I am truly awesome.)

Me with Uncle Neal, 2013

Here's the fortunate part: Uncle Neal, my grandmother's big brother (she died in 1985), told me, proudly, that he turned 89 five days ago. Eighty-nine years old and still capable of using the phone and hearing well enough not to ask, even once, What? I didn't hear you.
After congratulating him and promising to visit--I would bring a sugar-free cherry pie-- I told him I was turning 49 in less than a month. He laughed. (Swear, he laughed!)
"You're a baby," he said.
"Don't feel like a baby," I said.
"Every day's a gift," he said. "When do you think you might come visit? We're here all the time; can't go anywhere."
The "we're" is Uncle Neal plus his beautiful wife, Marcella. Each is home bound and in various stages of life-ending poor health. Marcella had a severe stroke about a year ago. Uncle Neal has congestive heart failure that has advanced. Hospice nurses come three times a week.
"What about the other four days?" I asked.
"We have round-the-clock care," he said. "Twenty-five hundred dollars a week."
I gasped. "A week?" Good God, I thought. Highway robbery.
"It's getting too expensive," he said. "That's a terrific amount of money every week."
I changed the subject. I become outraged and start feeling insane whenever the cost of elder care is being discussed. It's a hot-button topic for me, almost as bad as the immigrant-children issue that's bringing out the mean in people.
***
"When you were my age, did you think you'd make it to 89?" I asked my uncle.
He laughed again.
"Oh, no. No, no, no."
Suddenly I felt better about my upcoming birthday. Maybe I do have a few good (stiff) years left.

Yoga is hard

On Tuesday evening, I went to my first yoga class. The instructor is a new friend, the kind of person I aspire to be: fit, strong, smart, organized, a farm-to-table eater.
This was Tuesday evening. Here it is Thursday afternoon, and I am JUST NOW able to ascend stairs without a fast reminder that yoga kicked my butt two days ago.
Had I known how hard yoga is, especially for the beginner, I most assuredly would not have gone.
I am telling you: that 45 minutes spent pushing and pulling my body around on a thin foam mat was grueling. I literally had sweat dropping onto the purple mat. There was a time thirty minutes in when I thought I might die, even.
I persevered, however, and figured that my body would hurt the next day. I was wrong. By 2 a.m., only six hours later, my wrists, which were throbbing, awoke me. My inner thighs felt tight and untethered at the same time. Weird feeling. By the time I got out of bed at 4:45, my arms were encased in concrete. Lifting my arm to brush my teeth hurt.
So I figure that I need to return to that mat next Tuesday, too, only this time I am going to go more at my own pace and not try to follow every move the instructor gives.
If I end up in Child's Pose for 75 percent of the routine, so be it.

What my instructor looks like:

What I look like:

Hot yoga

Tonight I am going to my first yoga class. Ever.
I am having some anxiety.
1) I might be too fat for yoga.
2) I am not very flexible. There may be only one yoga pose I can do.
3) What if that one yoga pose causes me to fart loudly?
4) Are people barefoot when they do yoga?
5) Is that the correct phrasing: do yoga?
6) If people are barefoot doing yoga, are they also neatly pedicured?
7) Am I going to have a hot flash while doing yoga?
8) Will I have a sneezing attack while doing yoga and pee myself a little?
9) Am I too fat to do yoga?

My first class is taught by a 30-something petite blond named Kat. She is a college-educated
stay-at-home mom of a toddler, a little boy with sky-blue eyes. Kat is smart and down-to-earth and obviously flexible. I mean, she's the teacher, right? She also has started her own business: designer landscaping.
Just this morning I sent her pics of my barren backyard. What do I plant here? I asked. And what about over there, in front of that huge expanse of siding?
She knows. Kat is a master gardener.
Tonight I'll find out if she's also a master yoga instructor.
She's certainly got her work cut out with me.

I have something to say

Today's gripes are numerous and somewhat unrelated.
1) Governor Chris Christie's weight should not be a hot-button topic right now. Why is the guy being derided for his size? Criticizing fat people is sort of like hating people for their skin color. Why is it acceptable to make fun of overweight people? I want to make a voodoo doll in the image of that former surgeon general who made the recent snide and inappropriate comment about the governor: "I fear he's going to die in office." With my homemade doll, I will poke her in the crudely sewn cloth backside and hope that she wakes with a killer backache. Skinny people do have aches and pains. Skinny people get cancer. Skinny people have strokes. Skinny people die in office.
2) My back hurts right now. I am not skinny. But when I was (1983-1985; 1991-1996), I got backaches. Also, headaches. I had raging PMS most of the time because I was hangry (hungry + angry).
3) I found the movie "Seeking a Friend for the End of the World" to be too depressing and not funny.
The movie was supposed to be funny! It was advertised as a romantic comedy. FUCK!
4) I am pissed at my husband because he dismissed my plea (last night, after viewing above- mentioned movie) to live a more exciting life. "We do not know how much time we have," I said. "Let's live large. Let's do something!"  Our life is like this: Work until 5:30. Eat dinner. Lounge on couch until bedtime, which is 8:15 p.m. for him and anywhere from 10:30 until 1 a.m. for me. Rinse. Repeat.
5) I can't read shit without my reading glasses.
6) I can't find my reading glasses 75 percent of the time.
7) Yes, I have multiple pairs. I am not an idiot.
8) My posterior tibialis is still hobbling me. After seven weeks of wearing a damned orthopedic boot, I go to the podiatrist yesterday for my check-up, tell him that my foot pain is worse, not better, and the pain is most severe when I walk in the boot. "Then stop wearing the boot," he tells me. It is an old joke I find not funny.
9) Tonight I have an MRI scheduled to figure out why my foot still hurts after nine weeks of pain. Should have shaved my legs this morning, but I awoke with a backache ~ and it's not because I'm fat. It's because I'm hobbling around like Quasimodo on account of this damned orthopedic boot.
10) Maybe someone has made a voodoo doll in my image.
11) My mother is dead. My aunt is dead. My father is dead. I find myself jealous of people my age who still have living parents and aunts.
12) The dogs got me up at 12:30 this morning. Bella was making her disgusting choking noises. Couldn't get back to sleep (me, not the dog), so I spent the next two hours on facebook. My left eye itched so badly that I rubbed it into a swollen mess. Finally got to sleep around 3 a.m. This morning, my eye was practically swollen shut.
13) I have $52 in my checking account.
14) My husband needs to un-ass some money.
15) A local eleven-year-old boy died two days ago from an asthma attack he'd had nine days earlier.
16) I suck at life. I have life and spend much of it complaining.

Not doing well eating well ...

Considering school starts OFFICIALLY Monday, Aug. 18, it occurred to me very recently that my new students might, just might, given the size of my newest upper abdominal fat roll, think their communication arts teacher is a pregnant communication arts teacher.
Seriously. I look about six months along, unless I'm exhibiting a strategic suck-it-in maneuver and standing straight on, no profile view. Where this fat roll came from I have no clear idea.
I have several foggy ideas, however, and these explanations have mostly to do with cheese. Vast cheese consumption, as a matter of fact. I love cheese -- in any form (cubed, shredded, melted) and in most any flavor (cheddar, mozzarella, provolone). Pretty much I've visited the Cheese World most of this summer and sampled about six thousand bites.
Is there time to look, maybe, say, four months along? Is it even possible to lose fifteen pounds in eighteen days?
Feeling panicky.

Of cavities and old-lady glasses

Ruh-roh!
At my (yearly) eye exam today I was informed oh-so-delicately that I am in need of bifocals. I suppose I knew this day was coming; still, it smarts a bit on the inside to digest what this really means: half glasses on a beaded string. Won't I just be the marmy schoolteacher? Next thing you know I'll have to buy five pairs, like my Uncle Terry: one for every important room, including the car, which isn't exactly a room, per se, but you know what I mean.
I think it's true that the body starts to decay -- I mean, fall apart -- once forty hits. I clearly remember my dentist telling me that very thing back when I was eleven years old, sitting in his uncomfortable green plastic chair, having eleven cavities filled. Yep, that's right: ELEVEN cavities. (After all the smoke and drilling, the dentist went into the waiting room and yelled at my mother, and then I got yelled at in the car during the entire ride home, which would have been fifteen minutes, only Mom stopped at Zarda Ice Cream to get herself a rootbeer float, to deal with her "nerves." Of course, I got nothing, what with my ELEVEN cavities and all.)
But anyway, the dentist, Dr. Cox, told me these words, exactly: "You'd better take good care of your teeth now, Young Lady, because once you turn forty everything starts to go downhill." He then cited several health concerns that appeared following his fortieth birthday, chief among them a predisposition to "throw his back out," which meant nothing to me because I was, after all, eleven years old and limber in every way possible.
So, to recognize all that ails me now that I am in my 42nd year, prepare to be either impressed or distressed. I present, then, a list of my bodily decay:
1) need of bifocals
2) propensity to "throw back out"
3) new fat roll (upper abdomen)
4) breast sagginess
5) gray hair, kinky and stand-straight-up at the hairline
6) parentheses wrinkles around the mouth
7) need to have fourth crown put on (related, I'm quite certain, to those eleven cavities all those years back)
8) random heart palpitations (although, I'm glad to report, since I started taking a magnesium supplement those have gone away ... )
9) complete inability to understand the lyrics to 75 percent of the songs kids listen to these days
10) acute awareness of my bowel's performance and knowledge of every bathroom location within a thirty mile radius
11) forgetfulness, especially when it comes to words ... so, so many words these days are "on the tip of my tongue"
***
I'm sure this list could grow, but my bladder is beckoning. That and I need to go walk the dog ... she's over forty too.