Mom advised - 'Don't Get Old, Joseph!'
by Joseph Patrick Meissner, attorney

“Don’t get old, Joseph!”

This was my mother’s best advice to me as the years passed by. When she first said that to me, I thought it was just a joke. Worn out Irish wisdom. I thought. But as the years evaporated, I came to know the hard cement truth of these four words.

As I have seen years vanished, I realized why Mom warned me from her advanced perch of truth. There have been so many signs of aging which first only suggested themselves but then continued to eat away more deeply into me. Let me take some warning signs which started as wise cracks but have become firm hard clumsy rocks as obstacles in my pathway.

First, I cannot run as I once did nor even walk with such conviction and firmness as I did so long ago. The Olympics have already turned me down as a 100-yard dasher. I walk quickly and think I am keeping up with the flow of the sidewalk traffic. But as I hop from one wide concrete stone to the next, I can feel that other pedestrians are gaining on me and I surely lose this competition as they skirt past me, careful usually not to knock down this swaying eighty-two-year-old amnesia-stricken oldster to the ground.

Second, I slip and fall so often these days. My legs cannot support me. I wave the walking stick like a magic wand to smooth down the uneven stones as well as protect me from overly aggressive ladies. I lean on the stick’s handle in a heroic mission to anchor it into the soft grass walk borders and discover some kind of support, but nothing holds anything nor anywhere.

Third, eating stress with bouts of choking now mark my meals. There are internal problems. The gut and throat and my stomach do not seem to work together at all like a well-run machine. It is a massive breakdown. I eat items and cannot fully chew them because my teeth are giving me problems. So I swallow whole firm balls of food--that is everything glued together. It rolls down my throat and I feel like I am choking. I spit up and cough and try to free up the esophagus, but it is crammed so tight.

Then, fourth, there is some kind of pain that travels thru the right side of my body from my throat and neck and down thru my right side. This cannot be a heart attack? Would not a heart attack manifest itself on the other side of my chest? I worry but do not want to investigate this at all. If this is fatal, then take me away and dispose of this mortal coil. I won’t fight this any longer.

Fifth, my teeth have decayed so grossly from when I was a little boy and I first chewed 5000 pieces of hard tack bubble gum to find the card collection treasury hidden inside the waxed wrapper. They are now pitiful stumps.

Sixth, two more failings. My fingers do not dance as fast as they once did on the typewriter keys of the computer; I make so many mistakes with wrong spellings, or English mis-constructions. Before, I typed a paragraph error-free one time, but now it is several times to eliminate as many stupid errors as I can.

Then the eyes. When I was a child, I had problems with seeing. Every six months in grade school the sister herded us down the hall and we did have an eye test. We all would-line up by the nurses’ office, Then one by one we marched in and had to read the chart which was attached to the entrance by the open door. Well, I did not want to fail the test. So as I entered the door I glanced sideways at the chart and memorized the letters standing as rigid stiff soldiers. Then when I stood my twenty feet away against the far wall, I recited my memorized menu. I squinted until the nurse pointed out the charge I had my answers ready. I was perfect.

But finally one day, maybe a Wednesday, I decide not to pull my eye winning trick and but tried to read the letters for real. ` Naturally I utterly failed. “You need glasses,” the nurse exclaimed. That is how in the 6th grade, I wound up with thick bifocals. These glasses, I used them until I reached 22 years old, and had to get to up-dated ones.

There also was another adventure with my weak and defective eyes. In my fourth year in college, I had been trained in ROTC to be an artillery spotter. Then they gave me a test with colored balls of thread. After this, the tester said, “Do you know you are color-blind?” Here was another new revelation.

However, my worst health concern are the attacks on the brain. It is when you meet an old friend. And he says, “Hello. Joseph.” But you cannot remember his name. You turn over his face again and again in your memory file. Nothing comes up. You could just confess your failing. But what would your friend think of that? Or you can stumble thru the conversation and hope somehow his name will emerge. Maybe it will pop up in your brain. Maybe somebody in the crowd will say something. You could just mumble your way through. Good luck with that ruse.

Then there are the places where you have been. You cannot remember details of these either. There are streets where you have walked down. Now these are just empty spaces. There are trees sticking up everywhere but you do not remember individual ones. They only seem to laugh as the wind curls through their branches.

There is more. But you get the idea. My Mother knew what she telling us. But we could not heed her advice. We have and will get older while disobeying her as we always overlooked wise counsel. So do not fight the journey. The old joke and answer to my mother is, “What is the alternative?”

We want to remain on this side of the grass, rather than under. So say your prayers. Thank the Lord for each day bringing us closer to the huge retirement.

When we do reach the other shore, be certain to greet Mom with a huge smile and tell her, “Thank- you for all the wise words you shared with us. Thank you for your prayers that guided our step. Perhaps we did not obey you then, but we appreciated your love for your wise open and long-lasting protective thoughts.”