All is Well in the Aging Aisle

I am simpatico with Joe Biden. He likes cars. I like cars. He’s a liberal. I’m a liberal. He falls up stairs. I fall off my chair. We are of one blood.

Watching my beloved Joe trip, fall, trip, fall, trip, fall, and then finally reach the top of the airplane stairs, turn around and salute did my heart good. Joe Biden is nothing if not a guy who gets up after falling, straightens his aviators, and forges ahead. He is 78 and, even with somebody as fit as he appears to be, age exacts a price. Stuff happens with your body that you don’t authorize.

Your feet aren’t always aware of where they are. This is a tricky proposition. The neurons get a bit frayed by the decades of traffic and, sometimes, A doesn’t tell B that a step is coming and a trip ensues. But be wise. The owner of said feet could still write a dissertation on the elements of movement, explicate the dimensions of aging, and speak extemporaneously at length, citing scientific fact and personal experience, making a case so compelling that an entire audience would yearn for aging, pray for deliverance into their blessed 70’s.

The audience would applaud wildly – young and old alike. Age is just a number, they all would murmur going out the doors of the lecture hall, and tripping and falling are just things that happen randomly in the universe, especially to the more mature among us. Those things, when they happen, are just things. They don’t carry a deeper, more sinister meaning. One can fall off one’s chair, sit back in the chair, and be brilliant as shit. I’m living proof.

I truly believe this, knowing as many old people as I do, that unless a person has Alzheimer’s or other dementia, the brain is the last to go. So if Beloved Biden, or BB as I will now call him, trips up the airplane stairs, we shouldn’t worry. Nor should you worry if I fall off my chair. I am still sharp as a tack, as people like to say when they encounter an older person who isn’t drooling on her doily. Wink.

Trust me, both BB and I still got it going, our trips and falls notwithstanding.