Old for My Age

My mom used to say that I was born an old soul, which I always took as a compliment. (I tend to take things as a compliment unless you tell me otherwise.)

Since my brain tumors, I have more in common with old ladies than I used to. I walk slowly with a cane. I laugh at bodily functions and at other times that temporarily-abled folk find inappropriate. I hold onto walls when I walk. I say, “Pshaw” when someone talks malarkey. I sit down when I shower and when I exercise.

I’ve joined the Silver Sneakers (no, Ann, not Silver Slippers) class at the YMCA. We sit in chairs and tap our toes and lift our weights to music that sounds like music to me. We each try to summon the coordination to bounce a rubber ball on the floor and then throw it in the air and clap once before catching it again. (My ball generally bounces off of a neighbor or two, but they never give me a dirty look. They just say, “Don’t worry. You’ll get there.”)

For squats, we stand up from the chair ten times. Sometimes our right foot circles clockwise while we snap in a counter-clockwise motion. That’s really hard for me.

I am 48 years old. I suppose that the other thirty or so, mostly women, are in the seventies and eighties.  I suspect that they are wise because they laugh a lot.

We had a potluck last week: two salads, a bowl of meatballs, and fifteen desserts.

These are my peeps.