So How Old Am I?

I could give you a number, I suppose, But there are other things in my life which reinforce my years on this planet.

I'm old enough to have gotten both kind of measles and chicken pox before there were shots. Miserable as it made him, we were relieved when my brother got the mumps at a very young age, knowing it was more likely he could be a father some day instead of if he got them as an adult.

I'm also old enough to have gotten TB tests in school every year, and also have either an arm or leg checked in class to be sure we had the scar from a recent enough smallpox vaccination. When the first polio vaccine came out we all got it from a needle. Our parents knew somebody in an iron lung, and I had a classmate in a leg brace. When the sugar cube version came out, a better and painless vaccine, we joined the town in the high school gym for our cube even after having had the first shot.

I'm old enough to watch eggs being candled by the lady Mom bought eggs from, and afterwards heard about diabetes in a granddaughter there. It was always what we call type one and she would die early from it, we were told, after going blind and loosing her feet to gangrene like her grandma.

I'm old enough that when I was very young, and our parents ran a resort, I was pretty much given free rein over the property without worrying about getting lost or running into bad people.  We just won't mention how often I followed the path along the lake in either direction from our place to the two resorts also on the lake. I knew exactly where in the yard the four-leaf-clovers grew every year. Finding a droppd penny was a treasure!

I'm old enough to remember outhouses and not just at summer camps, and getting a Saturday night bath in a tub on the kitchen floor, filled with water heated on a wood stove for the purpose, where each took their turn in the same water starting with the littlest (and presumably carrying the least dirt.)

I'm old enough that we had a phone on the wall where you lifted the ear piece, cranked out a pattern of shorts and longs to reach a very limited supply of numbers, and everybody on your party line could hear the ring pattern and listen to everything said.

I'm old enough that my first awareness of the cost of things was Mom complaining about the prices of stamps rising all the way to two cents for a postcard and three cents for an envelope. When I was in high school she sent me to the store for bread and milk, and complained again because each of those had risen to thirty five cents.

I'm old enough that when the family took a driving trip out to California one could still see distant mountains clearly as soon as they were above the horizon.

I'm old enough to have grown up without TV unless we traveled down to the Minneapolis to visit relatives who had it and knew who Howdy Doody and Captain Kangaroo were.  There was a radio in the house but rarely listened to until after supper. "Our Miss Brooks" and "Life of Riley" come to mind, and in the car hears "Gunsmoke" and "point of Law". When the family moved into a small town there was celebration when an antenna was put on top of the water tower and could broacast NBC for a 3 mile radios. We watched Bonanza and now Gunsmoke on our own small TV.

At that same time as bread and milk prices rose we moved to St. Paul,  where my brother started college and I finished high school. I dated a couple of boys who would drive from St. Paul to Hudson, Wisconsin to buy gas sold there for twenty-two cents a gallon. A full tank of gas was an affordable way for a teenager to just drive all over and call it a date, showing somebody who didn't get around much where parks and rivers the the fancy homes were.

I'm old enough to remember Daddy was a 4-pack-a-day smoker and nobody thought anything of it. As a kid I could even go buy him a pack without objection at the store. After his first heart attack, when he asked the doc when he should come back to see him for a follow up, the doc told him 6 months if he stopped smoking. If he didn't stop, he'd not live long enough for a next appointment. He quit cold turkey. A few years later he was one of the very first tripple bypass cardiac surgery recipients in the St. Paul area, eventually living to 97.

I'm old enough to have lost exact track of how many colonoscopies I've had to have. Including this week it might be five or six. But I clearly recall the one where the anesthesia didn't work in their drug coctail but the paralytic did. Thank goodness they don't use that any more. I would have loved to scream or swear, maybe both.

I'm old enough to have to think how many surgeries of whatever kind I've had, and realize later I missed one. Last week I had a diagnostic scan and was asked to list what all the scars were from, and that's just on my belly. There are more.

I'm even old enough - and have been for a while - to have prepared a mental list for this post of all I wanted to say and know I'm still missing a few things. But I'm not even close to old enough for forgetting how much I love the guy in the next chair, and all the reasons why over all the years. And most of that list you'll never get, on purpose.