Fifty Really Is The New Thirty.

Again, it boils down to history.

Taking folks to the doctor's rooms often includes a nugget of wisdom given at the same time. At times of course it is mere village news otherwise defined as gossip.

This morning I had just helped a sprightly nonagenarian walk up to the doctor's rooms when I was about to encounter my nugget of wisdom. He walks a bit slower due to the ubiquitous hip trouble of his generation but he is as sharp in mind as they come. In fact one time after I'd taken him to the shop, he noticed a wrong price being rung up out of a shop of at least twenty items. We are talking about fifty cents or so.

There are only two places in the village where a traffic jam is par for the course...the village shop and the doctor's. Often I run into someone I know or who knows me enough to have a bit of a chat and catch up on the news. Today, a much younger gentleman, an octogenarian, was waiting for his wife and the two of us got talking. Naturally we dotted our mental lines between the pillars of being outside of a place of ill health and our fortune at not having to be inside. Kind of like those visits to Monopoly's jail. Just passing through...

Somehow we ended up talking age and how one carries it.

" You know, I can remember how fifty years ago anyone who was fifty looked old and wrung out. They looked and dressed as if they were old already. Not like today. Fifty means nothing anymore and often they look decades younger. "

I could see his eyes trying to ascertain my age but I kept mum. Along the way he had been privy to my age but had forgotten. Well, not looking a gift horse into its mouth, I greedily took his general statement to have been aimed at me although age is but a number...

Biggi