Wannaskan Almanac for Thursday November 1st, 2018 by WannaskaWriter

Things your parents never told you about aging: Part 1
Is your face tight? Is it slowly stretching taught over your cheekbones, brows, ear to ear? Do your lips protrude just enough so they close when your mouth closes?  Do you salivate when you smell or think of your favorite foods? Can you contain your saliva without a second thought? Can you see through your eyelids like you did when you were six years old? Do you, or have you ever had a lovely neck, your skin resembling the smoothness of a marble statue? If so, you’ve had facial reconstruction or skin-restoration out-patient therapy, but I’d think you’d know it. It isn’t a natural phenomenon unless you’re still 25-years old.

Things your parents never told you about aging: Part 2
If you’ve awakened to a damp to wet pillow, experienced a wet cheek or temple, wet hair or beard chops more than once, realized in your morning mirror that your eyelids descend over your eyeballs to just slits like an arctic explorer’s snow glare mask, accepted the only thing short of surgery or inflation to correct your gobbler neck is to grow a beard, like me, if you can, then you’re older, probably much older, 35-40 years older--or older yet. Maybe you just don’t care anymore. What’s the point?

Things your parents never told you about aging: Part 3
Well, for one reason, you would’ve never listened. You didn’t want to talk about losing your figure when your mom did. “It ain’t goin’ to happen, Ma, not to dis here body,” you would’ve haughtily said. And when she told you to put your head up, shoulders back and stand up straight for better posture, you blew her off by saying,
“I ain’t no soldier, Ma, lay off me.”
And those days she groaned about drooling on her pillow for no reason at all, you laughed and said, “That’s because you’re old, Ma, it’s because you’re stinkin’ old.”

Things your parents never told you about aging: Part 4
Well, you were thinking that, if you didn’t say it. My Ma would’ve given me that second's worth look of terror about to descend on me for even thinkin’ that stuff out loud. So, no, that didn’t happen, but the thing is, she didn’t tell me about drooling either. I mean my mom told me a ton of stuff, she wasn’t short of information. My mom wasn’t mum, if you know what I’m saying, but I see now, at my age of nearly 68, she, um, reserved a few things in my life for personal discovery.

Things your parents never told you about aging: Part 5
*Note to contemporary older parents.
I haven’t always been almost sixty-eight, although any one of my three wives may have been shocked at that statement. I never had the rock ‘n roll all night stamina of Joe McDonnell. For instance, come about ten o’clock in the evening, I’d be thinking of heading to bed for I was raised by old parents* (My folks were in their forties when I came along--and, no, I just didn’t walk into their lives, I was born. Mom was 42 and Dad was 46. )

My activity level was always half the speed of my contemporaries. Everybody else my age was zipping about their lives and I was sauntering about, slowly acknowledging their passing as a tortoise would a hare--some of my younger co-workers at the toy factory harried me about my low-key work performance thinking for all that time I was just a slacker, and not the 20-25-years older person than they were, I was. After word got around that I was old enough to be their grandfather in most cases, nobody expected me to do as much, or the little I was doing, so it all worked out in the end. I never broke stride. All was good.

Things your parents never told you about aging: Part 6
I started feeling I should offer something to the younger generations whose parents are so busy at the gym or regional skin restoration specialist and may not have the time to pass those gems about aging on to their offspring, so a few years ago, I started writing things down as they came to me.

Things your parents never told you about aging: Part 7
The thing is that as you age, parts of you shrink as parts of you grow, like your nose and ears for instance. My father had a prominent nose in his latter years. It wasn’t a strawberry-colored reddish nose that some old guys get with the little black hairs protruding from the outside in various places, but a nose that was easily evident on his face all the same. His ears were roughly the same length.

My dad’s nose was nothing that you’d miss in conversation, yet neither would you have to duck to avoid being hit by it should he turn his head, nor would you risk being de-capped had he suddenly looked up should you be in close quarters to him--it wasn’t that kind of ‘big nose.’

Things your parents never told you about aging: Part 8
But one thing that wasn’t evident in a nose like that either, was that as his nose grew larger on the outside of his face, it also grew larger on the inside of his face and therein developed, as I have, an unbelievable labyrinth of fluted cavities and turbinates for nasal debris and secretions to alight; affix to; secure upon; to linger, that I wasn’t aware were there a few short ‘and smaller’ years ago.

My nose has become a virtual pipe organ of mysterious origin, one I must examine in detail before I enter public places or engage in face-to-face conversation, regularly conducting, when I think of it, what is affectionately called, “A booger check” before I leave the house or the confines of my car, just so neither me, the speaker, nor the recipient i.e., the person or persons to whom I’m speaking, are startled nor repulsed momentarily by sight nor action, of unnecessary nasal discharge, real or imagined, upon the mucus membranes of my nostrils resembling small sticks, grass, flower pollen or unidentifiable flotsam. It just isn’t polite not to be aware of what’s inside your nose--or isn’t, and should be. Old people, like myself, should be conscientious about such things.

Things your parents never told you about aging: Part 9
Men lose their butts, as do women.
I remember my mom saying, “Now look at Kerry. He’s got a butt like a jackrabbit. But you got a nice butt.”
“What?” I said, with no little disbelief that I realized my 58-year old mother was lookin’ at my friend’s butt and commenting on it.
“What are you talking about? What’s this, with butts? Kerry’s butt ...”
“I’m just saying,” she might have gone on to say. “Kerry is a tall skinny kid with a butt that shaped like a jackrabbit’s butt. Some guys have nice butts. Kerry doesn’t.”

Well lately, my pants have been getting looser, so loose the wife has even taken to dragging out the bathroom scale on occasion to check my weight, theorizing that I have gone on some secret diet to lose weight. “Could be you’re losing your butt. Your legs are getting skinnier too--as if that’s even remotely possible.”

Can you imagine expressing that to your wife or girlfriend?
“Could be you’re losing your butt--or your unusually skinny legs have gotten even skinnier, Edna.”
"Edna?"
"Edna?"