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Of the signs of age, even those that no one will tell you about
(Published in my column in Lasha, written before my 51st birthday)
In two days I will be 51. When you get older (from what age do you say you get old?) there are phenomena you expect. We don’t exaggerate with the “expectations”, but you are not surprised when they arrive: white hair? Makes sense. Extreme wisdom? expected. Abdominal obesity? You were hoping it would specifically skip you, but no. They all talk about hot flashes, but no one told me about the difficulty of eating arugula. Difficulty eating arugula, you ask? wait and see. Or you won’t see, because it seems the world is trying new and personalized jokes on each of us.
Examples, don’t be surprised:
1. Difficulty eating arugula. or a rocket. or stems of any kind. If a stem gets into your salad (that is, mine) – you may find out the hard way and without prior preparation – you are in danger of death. Until I internalized that the best way to prolong my life at this stage is to avoid salad leaves, I often found myself performing with my own hands and under the condition of a surgical procedure that I will spare the details of later.
2. You believe that video in the feed is offensive.
3. You may start to develop a dependency on a specific towel. One morning you wake up and the rest of the towels in the house (all carefully selected) look like a compromise. About a decade ago, a second before my father met his second wife, he was, how should we say this respectfully? Active bachelor. During that time he always had a pillow in the trunk, because he may have been a spontaneous man who was open to new experiences involving sleeping outside the house, but he was not open to new experiences in the field of pillows. So far. Its border was marked with a pad. My limit, it seems, comes in the form of a super soft sand-hued towel.
4. Renew yourself, you have developed a taste for tablecloths (A tablecloth should be made of linen in one color and this color is beige).
5. You prefer a passage over a window (It’s not that you prefer transit as much as you gave up on the idea of transferring a flight without getting up to pee).
6. You can’t afford to forget a sweater. Or go out with wet hair.
7. You need subtitles to understand something.
8. You need a flashlight to read the menu.
9. You have a cherry picker at home. and chia seeds. and a drill. and a screwdriver. and towels for guests.
10. You don’t understand why they don’t lower, You can go crazy, I can’t hear myself thinking.
11. The sleepy neighbor. Includes the whole package: putting your ear to the door when voices are heard in the stairwell and developing an opinion about the state of the garden and the bin room. Only the fumes of passion that I have left stop me from raging in the building’s WhatsApp group. A privilege that I try to keep until the age of seventy, so that there will be something to wait for.
12. You discover that Nora Efron was right. Those were never the forehead wrinkles, it’s the neck. or the chin. or both.
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From the signs of age: you (I) cry from every song by De Nationale.
I keep what I can of you
Split second glimpses and snapshots and sounds
You in my New Order t-shirt
Holding a cat and a glass of beer